Mailing Lists (and high volumes) vs Newsgroups

Dan Nelson dnelson at allantgroup.com
Sun Jan 2 17:36:43 PST 2005


In the last episode (Jan 02), Sergei Gnezdov said:
> 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.

You can use gmane.org to read almost all of the FreeBSD lists via nntp.
 
> 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's a lot easier to read email offline than nntp, for one, and
conversations progress much quicker on email lists because people
interested in the topic get messages immediately instead of having to
constantly poll the news server.  I subscribe to mailing lists that I
am active on, and less-frequently used ones I read via gmane's nntp
interface every few days.  I use mutt's scoring rules to sort topics
(mutt is both an email client and a newsreader, but I only use it for
mail; I read my news with mozilla).

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com


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