At last, something useful.
At 05:39 PM 2/4/99 +0000, Ivan Pope wrote:
>So what tools would you like to see added to mailing lists? How do you see
>mailling lists evolving? Where do we go from here?
I'd like to see more done with sublists and superlists. Listserv has the
idea of "topics", that allow people to pre-filter list traffic at the
server (but only if posters agree to use topics properly). Anyone with
a capable mail client can do similar filtering (based on subject line
syntax) at the receiving end but that's less efficient.
Anyway, topics to pre-filter msgs aren't enough. What you really need
is a way to logically group recipients without the artificial boundary
of who is on which list.
Here's a real example: I run Climber.Org, which currently has over 20
email lists and over 700 people subscribed (some to many lists). How do
I send a message to all 700 people? If I send to all the lists, some
people will get 10 copies. I'll get 22 copies. Ouch. In this case I
need a super-list that avoids duplicates if you are on more than one
list to which I send the message. With 22 lists, it's not reasonable
to pre-determine all possible combinations... with fewer lists it would
be possible to have a periodic update job that created combo lists, but
then how would you determine when a post should go to which list? The
best way would be to have list management software "notice" the set of
lists being copied, and auto-create the combo list on the fly. Even if
you had THAT, how would you catch the posts that are sent to each list
one at a time instead of with a long CC or TO list?
If anyone has implemented anything CLOSE to what I described, I'd love
to hear about it.
SRE
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