Usenet Gateway

[Michael Torrie]

On 05/23/2018 12:03 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:
> Yes.  NNTP and NNTP clients were designed from the ground up to deal
> with ongoing discussions shared by large groups of people posting lots
> of messages, and they're _very_ good at.
> 
> Email was designed for one person sending one message to another.
> 
> Over the years, people have cobbled together bits and pieces and
> features to try to make it work for shared discussions. As a result,
> mailing lists mostly work (especially for low-volume "groups") and are
> pretty decent compared to "web forums" and other such wastes of
> electrons.

I agree web forums really suck for any kind of multi-user conversation.

But mailing lists only working for low-volume groups?  That's news to
me.  But maybe I'm not a typical email user.
> But IMO email pales in comparison to NNTP when there are more than a
> few messages per day per group.

This is not my experience at all.  I used to use Usenet back in the day,
but for nearly the last two decades I've just used mailing lists,
procmail or other kinds of server-side filtering (including GMail's
filters) and a good IMAP email client like Thunderbird.  I read several
high-volume mailing lists this way and it works great. Each mailing list
goes into its own IMAP folder. The result is identical to Usenet in
functionality for me.  In fact, Thunderbird can work with Usenet and
IMAP all at the same time and you'd be hard pressed to see any difference.

GMail's web interface and mailing lists... ugh.  "Conversations" is not
threading no matter what Google calls it!

TL;DR version: with IMAP and server-side filtering of messages into
folders, the experience with email and mailing lists is very good
indeed.  Mailing lists every bit as well as Usenet given a good e-mail
client.