On Sunday 03 July 2011 04:29, [email protected] wrote: > I am very frustrated using mailing lists, having used fora for the > past few years.
While I on the other hand cannot understand why people would use forums when a perfectly good mailing list is available. > I cannot find a FAQ that defines terms and helps me understand how > to use mailing lists effectively. > Navigation is a real problem for me. > I can read only one message at a time on the web site. Get all mails sent to your e-mail address. You then have all the current information offline on your own computer. I used to keep these e-mails indefinitely, but that only duplicates what occurs on the Internet. The search engines on the Internet are much better at finding a specific historical post than my e-mail client is. I therefore expire old posts now after a month. Most threads run out of steam within that period. > What is the advantage of the mailing list over the forum? > As a user, I have not found any. And i have found very few advantages of Forums over a properly threaded mailing list. * You have to go to a forum, the e-mails come to you. * You can choose to follow or ignore any threads not of interest or in your field. * You often unexpectedly learn something previously unknown due to the wisdom of another. * You need only reply to questions you can answer, or to none at all when you are busy. * Often three people reply to the same e-mail unaware of the others responses. The querent then has choice of a variety of answers. * If a reply is malformed, inadequate or wrong, then someone else will usually correct or amend it. This allows more than the original querent to learn something. > In the days before www, we had news readers that helped. > Are there any readers available for the Mac that one could use for > the OOo mailing lists? Surely that would be a question for a Mac Mailing list / forum. It is not an OO.o issue. But i would say that even your Mac has an e-mail client to read e-mails. In this regard i find that recieving digest mails does not help. HTH -- Michael -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] For additional commands send email to [email protected] with Subject: help
