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Subject: Re: ADMIN POST: Future of MAPUG list ?
From: Bill Arnett
Reply To: mapug@shore.net
Date: Sun Sep 24 12:03:46 1995

At 4:30 PM 9/20/95, Pgoelz@aol.com wrote: >...
> Unfortunately, it would probably triple my connect time charges, since
>downloading Email is very fast compared to the time required to download a
>newsgroup from internet. I am not happy with the time required to get
>ANYTHING from Internet, since you have to start the browser, connect to the
>proper address, and do the download, all while on-line.

I have just the opposite experience. For me, it is much faster to read thru a newsgroup with 100 messages than to read 10 messages on this list. This is simply because my newsreader (NewsWatcher on the Mac) has an interface that I greatly prefer to my mailer (Eudora) making it much faster to skip things I don't want to read. The time to download the data is also faster with news (for me) since my mail server is kind of slow.

>I have also noticed that newsgroups probably end up with substantially higher
>traffic than mailing lists, and some of that traffic is garbage. I assume it
>is because a newsgroup can be accessed by anyone browsing throgh the net,
>while a mailing list is not visible to the public? I don't mean to sound
>elitist, but there are advantages to mailing lists! They are more likely to
>be populated by people who are more focused on the topic. I don't want to
>pay for an extended download only to throw much of it out.

I suspect that the additional traffic would be very minor. There will be the occasional spam but that is really quite rare. There would probably be more newbies but isn't that a GOOD thing?

>...
>Bottom line is that I really would prefer to keep this list a mailing list.

IMHO, some of us would be better served by a newsgroup while others will prefer a maillist. Why is it that nothing is ever as simple as it first seems :-(

---
Bill Arnett                 "Science is a way of trying
San Jose, CA  USA            not to fool yourself."      -- Feynman
billa@zNet.com                              <URL:http://www.seds.org/billa/>