[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell Forum

[Nick Bowler]

On 2010-07-27 19:59 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> Darrin Chandler wrote:
> > IOW, if people use the proper and well known features of NNTP it would
> > be a better world than the one we have were people do not use proper and
> > well known features of SMTP.
> 
> SMTP is designed for delivering messages point-to-point. If your email 
> provider incorrectly marks half the list traffic as spam, you can't read 
> it.

This has nothing to do with SMTP, and everything to do with your email
provider being worthless.

> If your PC dies and you lose all your email, you cannot get it back 
> again.

Assuming you've never heard of list archives or backups, sure.

> If you hit reply, it only replies to the one person who wrote the
> message, not to the list.

Every mail client worth its salt has a 'reply to group' function, which
performs as advertised.  In fact, I can't even name a single one that
does not have this function.

> And every person has to download every single message ever sent.
> Because, let's face it, all a list server does is receive emails and
> then re-send them to everybody.

This point is valid, but not really relevant since the advent of DSL.  A
week's traffic on linux-kernel is about 30 megabytes.  Haskell-cafe is
about 4.

> If your mail system isn't operational at the moment when the email is
> sent, you'll never receive it and cannot ever get it afterwards.

This is not an accurate reflection of reality.

> I constantly have trouble with this mailing list. Even gmane can't seem 
> to thread it properly. But I've never had any trouble with threading in 
> any NNTP group, ever.

Mutt seems to have no trouble threading it properly.  I haven't
encountered an issue with gmane and this list, although admittedly I
don't use it often.

> [Well, apart from that stupid Thunderbird bug they still haven't fixed 
> yet. But that's a client bug. Use a different client and it goes away.]

The same can be said about email threading.

-- 
Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)