On Jan 15, at various times, Jeffrey Sharp wrote: what I have to add my vote to the many others who've said "NO!!!" An I would hate that. Right, I need another username/password (likely with different rules to all the rest) like I need another hole in my head :-) lynx. Browsers are much more cumbersome and slow than any sensible email client. And run on fewer systems. I sometimes use older systems for which there is no web browser, not even a text-based one, but there is a mail client. And using a browser require you to be online to read, which is not so good for those of us who use dialup. It also makes it harder to save individual messages. I often do that with mail; it's much harder to keep copies of web pages sensibly. You could also do that with mail. I'd prefer that wasn't implemented, though see below. Sometimes it's more appropriate to respond directly to someone, off-list. You could do most of that with email filtering too. In fact, it would be nice, in my opinion, if we did filter out the HTML (and the HTML portions of multipart/alternate messages, which we seem to have had more of recently). Actually, most people would spend *more* bandwidth on a website, because going back to a previously-viewed message would typically reload the page. More importantly, there are a lot of dialup users here. With a website you need to be online all the time you're reading, rather than slurping down a chunk of mail (as my system does a few times a day) to read offline. Less importantly, my system can do an early-morning mail fetch just before the end of the cheaper-rate nighttime period, and the mail is then there for me to read when I'm sufficiently awake (ie after two mugs of coffee) a little later (daytime call rate). Including me :-) Returning to the idea of having both email and a website, isn't the website essentially an extension of the existing archive (possibly more sophisticated)? I agree it's good to have both, but let's keep the mailing list as the primary and the archive as, well, an archive. remote up In on I disagree. Most ISPs run either IMAP or POP3 (or both). I have yet to see an Internet cafe, or attend a conference with 'net facilites, where I couldn't read my email. *Replying* to the list might be a problem in a few cases, but most ISPs (at least, most I'm familiar with here) operate some kind of authentication system so that users away from their normal location can still send mail (eg replies) from Internet cafes and the like. munge You Fair point. I don't mind my address being in the headers either, and in fact I prefer them to be there so people can email me directly, but if some do and some don't prefer that, perhaps we could set some preference per-user so that their submissions are/not munged. Some list manager software has that facility built-in. Summing that lot up, if the list were changed to become primarily web-based, I'd vote with my feet -- albeit with great regret -- but I have no objection at all to enhancing some of the mail facilities and providing additional methods of access and/or additional services. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York