NNTP instead of mail

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, I know that this one has probably been covered countless times before and has been shot down but I am new to the list and have not seen this discussion before so please hold back your flame ;) I understand the trouble of unreliable mail servers, I have been afflicted with this problem myself recently, so why not look at a technology that was specifically designed to fill this job. We could set up a private news server using INN. This way we could even divide the chat up into appropriate groups i.e. ccmp.offtopic, ccmp.dec.pdp8 etc etc so that people who are just interested in a niche collection don't have to bother with all the talk of other classic computers. However people also still have the option of reading everything on the list I also understand that one of the main attractions to this list is that it is subscription based which I guess keeps a lot of the spam from reaching it. However NNTP does support authentication. We could have a web interface similar to the one that we have at the moment that allows read-only access to the groups so that other people can search them. But we also could limit posting only to people with logons. From what I have read I also see that people like the mailing list approach because it allows them to connect to the internet for a short amount of time and collect all of their email and read it later. I know of many NNTP readers that allow offline viewing via synchronization. This means that people who move about a lot can view over the web if they want but it also keeps the people who use their ASR33's happy because NNTP is a clean protocol. (By clean I mean that it has not been infected with HTML). just my $0.02 Regards - -- Chris Blackburn E-Mail: cblackburn36NOSPAM at softhome.net E-Mail: cblackburn36 at NOSPAMgmail.com PGP Public Key: http://makeashorterlink.com/?C2AF31929