[Mailman-Developers] Re: Future of pipermail?

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000 23:09:55 -0800 
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:

> At 10:58 PM -0800 11/21/00, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> I've spent considerable time thinking about this and believe it
>> is to the lists' advantage in this case to hold firm.

> you'll lose. AOL is the first to make this mandatory for their
> users, but users want these features. And besides, AOL is the 800
> pound gorilla, and it's eating its lunch on your fence. Do you
> really think they're going to change back before your fence
> collapses under it?

No, but I also realise that AOL actually is't sitting on my fence.
They are sitting on other people's fence to be sure but their
presence in my neighborhood is small enough to be noise.

>> Aside: Less than 5% of my members are from AOL.  Less than 1% of
>> my semi-regular posters are from AOL.  The impact here (for me)
>> is quite small.

> lucky you. you're not typical then, not given the size of AOL. 

Precisely.

> But -- it's a losing battle, JC. AOL is the first. It won't be the
> only. My numbers show me that not only do ~90% of mail users have
> support for MIME email (stylized text, html, etc.), but most of
> them want to use it. And they don't like having to go through
> gyrations to avoid it -- and most have no clue how, and don't want
> to. 

While I agree (with some distaste), those gyrations have shown
themselves to have positive value for me.  FWIW I also enforce
quoting style (new text below quote), quoting formats (must have
leading quote characters on quoted lines), correct attributions for
all quoted text, etc, which are leading directly against AOL, MSN et
al, but which have also helped define the value I offer. 

It a per-case specific question, not suitable for the general case.

> t few people are in that kind of sellers market....

Too true.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw@kanga.nu
---------(*)                        : http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--