This reminds me of the comments everyone has made about contortions to
store mail into AFS when kpop is available and works far better as a
mail delivery paradigm.
It's not the same thing. It makes little sense to store news in afs,
because nntp is better at delivering news. But kpop is only suitable for
delivering mail, not for accessing your old mail that you have stored away.
Unless you want to use imap (I don't), it makes a lot of sense to store your
mail in afs.
Once you've decided to store your mail in afs, then it starts to make sense
to have the delivery agent drop it right into your box rather than having to
go fetch it. In particular, if you are at the dead end of a slow link, it
saves having to traverse the link twice.
I won't argue strongly in favor of this, and in fact it's not the way I get
my mail, but I don't think it's the same as the news delivery situation.
The difference is that news is a huge stream of read-once (if at all) data,
but mail is a smaller stream that tends to get stored away and re-read at a
future time.
