On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 09:02:29PM -0600, Callum Lerwick wrote: > > A long digression, I'll admit, but that's an SMTP/MTA issue that even > > people who know what they're doing aren't able to cleanly fix. How is > > a piece of software supposed to deal with it? > > Don't push messages in the first place? Heh... My point was that bounces can't be reliably handled in software due to problems with email itself, not due to anything specific to mailing lists. You're not suggesting that we do away with email entirely, are you? > Red herring. Any decent mail/NNTP client does 'offline' mode these > days, whereby they will mirror a mailbox/newsgroup on local storage. Hmm... So does that mean that mutt's not a decent mail client? (Yes, that's a joke. I'm well aware that you can use fetchmail or the like to get that sort of functionality when using mutt or other non-POP/IMAP MUAs.) > Its pretty well established at this point that > "pushing" is not a good way to go about mass distribution on the modern > internet. Pull is how the web works. And look at how successful > PointCast, Marimba and Netcaster were... Depends on what's being transmitted. How are most stock/news/ whatever tickers implemented? (They could be based on client polling rather than a server push, but, if you're concerned about excess usage of network resources, polling - especially frequent polling - is far worse than either push or pull.) Some information is better-suited to a push implementation, other information is better suited to being pulled on demand. When I read my email (including lists), I want it to come up immediately. I have yet to see a pull-based technology that can do that without polling and I tend to doubt that it's even possible. (Viewing a very large message in mutt is practically instantaneous. Viewing even a one-line post on Slashdot takes several seconds, at best.) Additionally, I find it much more convenient to have information from several sources aggregated in one place (mutt) instead of having to go out to each source separately (slashdot, perlmonks, and a dozen other web sites). Therefore, by my criteria, email (including mailing lists) works better as a push-based medium rather than pull-based. YMMV, but I think you're greatly exaggerating the rumors of push technology's death. -- The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened. - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)