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Why I Hate Mailing Lists

Started by Daniel Miessler · 7 months ago

I just recently posted two messages to a message list I lurk in. I don’t do this often, and now I remember why. Within a few minutes I’ve received probably 25 messages from various happless individuals who have fcuking auto-responders placed on the email address they use fo ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • Yeah, it's already out. It's called a forum or message board ;)
  • Interesting, I'll check into it. Do they have a link to it on altavista.com? That's where I search for stuff. ;)
  • I've found that most of the lists I'm on -- which are mostly deeply technical lists hosted by the w3.org, sourceforge, perl.org, python.org, and so on -- tend to not have this problem. I don't know what kinds of lists you're on, of course, but I think the symptoms you are describing are symptoms of amateurism (not on your part; I mean the people who are setting up the autoresponders), and not inherent in the medium. For many lists, something like Google/Yahoo groups are probably the most appropriate -- I think that those systems do a good job at filtering out this kind of thing, while mailman and majordomo don't even attempt it.

    @Marcin: I have never been able to get into web-based message boards and forums. The batch-based nature of the web simply doesn't translate well to an interactive conversation. I've yet to see a forums system that doesn't repeat all of the problems of usenet, without any of the solutions or optimizations that arose around usenet, like intelligent, protocol-specific clients and redistribution/local caching.
  • Yeah. A forum or nntp server works *so* much better than a mailing list.
  • Any decent mail filter (e.g., procmail) can handle this problem
  • "A forum with an accompanying RSS/Atom feed"

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