[Coco] CoCoList and the Web, was Re: CoCoList Survey on email?but no web browser access CoCo?users.

[Frank Pittel]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:23:37PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Wednesday 22 April 2009, John W. Linville wrote:

> >On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 07:06:55PM -0500, Roger Taylor wrote:

> >> At 12:57 PM 4/22/2009, you wrote:

> >>> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:59:27AM -0500, Sean wrote:

> >>> > Mailing lists are good for current discussions, but forums are much

> >>> > better for archiving info or being able to search for specific topics.

> >>>

> >>> * Citation needed *

> >>

> >> http://www.google.com/search?q=color+computer+forum

> >

> >Congratulations!  Google can find your website...so?

> >

> >>> If anything, I find web forums to be _much_ more _difficult_ to search

> >>> for specific topics.

> >>

> >> http://www.google.com/search?q=color+computer+forum+nitros-9

> >

> >Setting aside whether or not "nitros-9" is a _specific_ topic...

> >

> >All that does is point me at your forum.  It doesn't prevent me

> >from having to click through it or deal with its awkward interface.

> >And if I wanted a local copy of the information, I either need to cut &

> >paste to an editor or I need to mirror your website (which also could

> >change on a whim).

> >

> >For comparison:

> >

> >	http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/coco/2009-April/thread.html

> >

> >Of course, that still completely misses the point.  I don't want to

> >have to use a web interface _at_all_.  The email comes to me, and if

> >I think it will be interesting in the future then I don't delete it.

> >When I want to search for something, it is probably in my mail

> >folder already.  And if not, Dennis/Mailman has it waiting for me.

> >

> >John

> >

> >P.S.  Couldn't leave "specific topic" alone...

> >

> >	http://www.google.com/search?q=color+computer+superboard

> 

> Neither could I john.  First, I do NOT expire this list, ever, but due to a 

> drive crash in early 2002, my corpus of email from this list starts then and 

> with maybe 20 exceptions, every msg since then is sitting here for me to 

> consult should I be of a mind to.  Other than my inbox, this is the only non-

> expired mailbox I keep here and the list of lists I'm on in the left pane of 

> kmail is about 3" higher than my 1680x1050 screen.  Email comes to me, from 3 

> accounts on 3 servers, absolutely and totally automatically via some scripts I 

> wrote years ago that drive fetchmail, which in turn uses procmail as the local 

> MTA (Mail Transfer Agent), and procmail runs it all through spamassassin for 

> labeling.  I long ago gave up caring about false positives, so now when the 

> mail comes back from SA with an 'X-Spam-Level' line with 5 or more '*' in it, 

> procmail sends it on to /dev/null & I never see it, true for around 2000 a 

> week.  That leaves me with maybe 8 to 12 spams it didn't catch each day, which 

> I drop into the spam directory with one drag-n-drop, and about 10am in the 

> morning another script will feed all those to sa-learn -spam and then delete 

> them.

> 

> So ALL I have to do is sit here, and hit the + key to read the next message 

> and reply if I am so moved.  There is simply no way that webmail (that has to 

> be navigated to and then logged into) will ever be that simple and convenient, 

> nor is a 'forum' that has to be logged into just as if it was webmail.  

> Fetchmail takes care of all that stuff every 90 seconds, which is probably at 

> least 50 times faster than I could do it by hand.  Kmail scans the box 

> procmail dumps into every 2 minutes and sorts it to the appropriate folder 

> here, and all I see is a bold faced number of new mails showing up adjacent to 

> the folders name.  Send me an email, and the maximum possible time lag between

> it hitting the server at vz and my seeing it here is 3:30.  The last time I 

> logged into my mailbox at vz was several months ago & probably took me 5 

> minutes to get in cuz I had to look up all the passwords to get there.  And 

> then I had to keep hitting F5 to refresh my view.

> 

> That doesn't describe anything I'd call convenience compared to reading this 

> mailing list already sorted into the 'coco' folder.  Using convenience and 

> webmail in the same sentence is an oxymoron comparable to military 

> intelligence.

> 

> Simply said, this mailing list Just Works(TM).


I host my domain "deepthought.com" and the mail server is mine. All incoming mail
goes through sendmail which hands it off to procmail. I then use procmail to move
mail from mailing lists into their own folders. I use mutt as my mua and it has little
trouble dealing with multiple mailboxes. Rather then block "spam" I pick the mail
that I'm interested in from the incoming stream as best as I can. The rest I go through
every few days. Nothing gets deleted. I have no interest in a gui mua and find that
I miss out on a lot of spam.

Frank