All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

On mailing lists

djberg96 on 2004-03-10T22:01:44

I hate mailing lists. They suck. I'll take newsgroups and/or gforge style project pages over a mailing list any day of the week.

Why, may you ask? Because often times I have a bug report (hey, I'm on Solaris remember?) for some backend library that I don't give a fuck about, but which I need for something else, e.g. the fox gui lib, so that I can get FXRuby so that I can ultimately use an IDE called FreeRIDE.

So, I can either annoy the author(s) with direct email, which might piss them off severely, or I can subscribe, ask my question, hope for a response and then unsubscribe. Pain.

Another reason I hate mailing lists is that the archiving/searching interfaces for mailing lists usually fall into the "terrible" or "suck ass" category. That, or they're so overrun with spam that they're effectively useless and probably dead because they weren't moderated.

Rant over.

mailnews gateways

mary.poppins on 2004-03-11T00:17:03

There are mailnews gateways out there, that do the archiving and NNTP interface. Note that you may still need to subscribe to the ML.



One good one is gmane.org. It does spam filtering and even has web interfaces for reading and searching.

News forever!

brian_d_foy on 2004-03-11T06:15:51

I hate mailing lists too. Along with the things that you mentioned,

  • late-comers have to wait for new messages to show up, unless they use one of those goofy mail archive things (haven't seen one that doesn't suck)
  • everyone gets to download all of the messages, if they want them or not
  • you need access to your mail to see what you have (or use one of those goofy interfaces).


As mary.poppins pointed out, you can usually work it out to have it both ways, because there are people who hate newsgroups too :)