Hello Steve,
Monday, January 10, 2000, 6:45:01 PM, you wrote:
SL> On Mon, Jan 10, 2000 at 06:25:00PM -0800, Jason Thompson wrote:
>> Usenet, on the other hand...Well, I know none of the technical aspects
>> of Usenet, but I've seen that MS Outlook smoothly integrates news and
>> mail into one client. I've always liked Outlook for that, although
>> that's the only thing. :) So, it seems to me that usenet shouldn't be
>> too much to add to TB. And if TB v2.0 has usenet in plugin form, then of
>> course you can just unload the plugin if you wish!
SL> That's just it, though, Lookout! "smoothly integrates news and mail into
SL> one client" but it doesn't offer everything a news client does. News is not
SL> mail and mail is not news no matter how alike they look to the layman and how
SL> close the specifications are.
SL> There is no such thing as multi-post binaries in email.
SL> Newsgroups aren't to anyone. They are much more broadcast in nature. As
SL> a result, the way you filter through the data is different. For example, one
SL> of the most effective filtering schemes for news is scoring. I've yet to see
SL> an "integrated" email/news client implement scoring for news since they treat
SL> it as "just another mail folder." Scoring doesn't work as well for mail.
SL> How, exactly, will the client handle multiple news feeds, if at all? Most
SL> email clients which do it treat the streams separatel. However, it is common
SL> practice in usenet to cross-feed to get a complete feed. There is no
SL> guarentee that a message will get to all points equally. Again, since news
SL> isn't too anyone and a newsgroup is really more like a broadcast more than
SL> anything getting news from multiple streams and merging the articles (removing
SL> dupes) provides the best feed. This is something most news clients don't do
SL> and something an email client team trying to play news client programmer will
SL> most likely never aspire to.
SL> Of course, they can do it, and, as someone pointed out, have it
SL> implemented well enough to be "good enough." That is a problem, though. We
SL> have plenty of "good enough" news readers. We have plenty "good enough" web
SL> browsers. We have plenty "good enough" email clients. It seems what *ALL*
SL> email client programmers have missed (and web client programmers, and news
SL> client programmers) is that there is a subset that wants an exceptional email
SL> client *and* an exceptional news client *and* an exceptional web client but
SL> don't want it all in once since they understand it has proven, thus far, to be
SL> impossible to do!
SL> Yet we still have web clients doing mail and news. We still have email
SL> clients wanting to grab "discussion boards" (news). We still have news
SL> clients still wanting to do mail.
Hmmmmm, there are lots of little, shall I say, creature comforts I'd
like in TB 2 but reinventing the wheel, Agent for instance, would be a
really bad idea in my humble opinion.
--
Thanks,
John
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