[Mailman-Developers] Re: Requirements for a new archiver

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Oct 28, 2003, at 12:30 PM, David Champion wrote:

> message-delivery protocols, and tools that know about messages; why 
> keep
> trying to reinvent them over HTTP?

because once you leave the niche of dealing with your fellow geeks, 
that's what users are going to want. browser access. NNTP is simply a 
non-issue any more, and iMap is fine, but they know how to go to a URL, 
don't assume they can reconfigure their mailer.

Not saying don't do this, but if you write geek tools for geeks, you'll 
lose the rest of your audience, the non-technical users.

> Nobody needs web access: what they need is
> access via a web browser. With browsers that understand NNTP and IMAP
> prevalent, and with a wide selection of web-mail and web-news gateways
> for the cases where that doesn't work, this is sufficient.

is it? it seems to me to (frankly) be a real hack with bad navigation, 
at least the stuff I've seen. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

> 2. many people have IMAP software.

and in many cases, it's set up by someone else, and they have no clue 
how to tweak it on their own, or interest.

And for intermittent or one-time access to an archive? won't bother. 
And how does it get into google so they know to look at it in the first 
place?

I'm not really thrilled with this avenue. sorry.