Mailing Lists (and high volumes) vs Newsgroups

[Sergei Gnezdov]

Although I've been using FreeBSD for several years, I have not been
active with mailing lists at all.  I preferred to use newsgroups search
and a little bit of posting.

I am wondering, why mailing list is the official support mechanism (as
opposed to newsgroups)?  Ruby seems to be supported through newsgroups
quite nicely.

It seems to me that mailing lists still expose senders email address.  I
am worried about getting spam because of this.  Ok, nntp is even worse,
but I can manage that.

I also find that email applications don't deal as well with high volume
email messages.  I am comparing against newsreaders like:
	- Emacs GNUS
	- slrn
I like these newsreaders, because they allow me to assign scores based
on the subject and authors.  I can easily handle a very high volume ruby
newsgroup.  The longer I use the newsreader the faster I become.  For
example, if I did not pay attention the the original message the replies
are ignored automatically for me.  I will read 2 - 3 messages I am
interested out of 1000 post list in 30 seconds.

Ok, may be I am using the wrong tools...  I settled on Evolution as my
primary application and I like it.  Thunderbird is not bad either.
Neither can handle high volume subscriptions.

I'd appretiate advice on how to improve email handling.

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