pcl (11/17/82)
In an article a few minutes ago, I made the claim that the distribution
of a news article is a completely separate piece of information from the
topic category. Currently, we encode both of these in the name of the
"newsgroup" to which an article is posted; I submit that we should
separate them, and use a "To:" line to indicate the distribution,
leaving the "Newsgroups:" to designate JUST the topic category.
Apart from the need to separate two conceptually distinct pieces of
information, I see this as part of a larger proposal to merge
netnews-type messages with mail-type messages. Now, the merger that I'm
discussing is at the user interface, NOT the implementation level. I'll
try to indicate the various parts of my proposal.
Reason: Conceptually, message exchange via netnews and via mail are
quite similar. Analyzing the tasks, you can see that they have a lot
of obvious similarities. In addition, people submitting news items
frequently slip and try to use the '~' escapes of Berkeley's "Mail".
This wouldn't happen if news and mail didn't seem quite similar. So, I
think we should take the next step and unify the user's interface to the
two systems. The question is, how?
It seems like a few changes on each side ("Mail" vs. "netnews")
would yield a much-improved communication facility.
Transmission, design: On the netnews side, I think we should pull
the destination information out of the newsgroup name, and put it in
a "To:" line just like mail uses. Thus, the items on the "To:" line
would specify where the message was to be sent. For netnews items, we
would use pre-established domains, just like we have at present, e.g. "net",
"btl", etc., in addition to any of the ways we currently use to designate
who is to receive the message. On the mail side, we need to add a
"Newsgroups:" field to the header, to carry this category information
that netnews uses, but mail (before now) has not had. (BTW - this
suggests that "Msggroups:" might be a better name for this field, but
I could see staying with "Newsgroups:".)
Transmission, implementation: The ideas above could probably be done at
first just by adding the "Newsgroup:" field capability to Mail, and then
defining some system-level aliases for the domains "net", & etc. which
would pipe the article into 'inews' (merging the "net" from the "To:" line
with the "Newsgroups:" entries, if using the current netnews software. It
would be nice if 'inews' did this for you, under some command-line option).
With this, you could 'mail' your messages to "net, fred, somewhere!mary",
designating some newsgroup, and get all the advantages of 'Mail' in sending
the message, as well as making mail-messages and netnews-messages
uniform as far as the sender is concerned.
Reception, design: This is where mail would have to change a bit, to
blend into the newsgroups structure. What I picture here is having your
personal mail-messages be collected into one (or more) 'newsgroups', AS
THOUGH they were just another category of messages under netnews. (Of
course, no one else would be able to read them or anything, since they
would still be your PERSONAL mail, but they would LOOK like just another
newsgroup.) One thing that this suggests, that I find intriguing, is
the idea of having your personal mail divided into SEVERAL newsgroups
(designated by the messages' senders). For example, I regularly
exchange mail-messages about administering netnews (on our 60 local
systems), 'Mail', and some other things - each of these could
be 'newsgroups' for my personal mail. Of course, there would have to be
a default group ("general"?), and one for the most important things
("priority" - messages in this one would be displayed first).
Reception, implementation: My thoughts are less clear here. The
main approach that occurs to me is to enhance 'Mail' to understand
'newsgroups'. However, it would also need to be able to work through
the entire netnews database, and handle your .mailrc, etc. The
notesfile system might be able to offer some ideas here regarding what
this all should look like, but I've never used it.
The merger described above is actually two separate proposals, one
regarding sending messages and one for reading. As described, they
could be attempted separately, but I would like to see the two systems
evolve in a direction compatible with their eventual merger.
Comments?
Paul Lustgarten
Netnews Administrator for
Bell Labs - Indian Hill
ixn5c!pclsjb (11/17/82)
First, I would like to say that Paul has some good ideas here, and they certainly deserve some attention. There is one idea I don't like though: The proposed merger of mail and news. I personally like having my mail and my news very (and I mean *VERY*) separate. I always read my mail first thing when I get on; I read my news when I have time (usually a few times each day) I wouldn't want to have to wade through all the news just to find my mail. I also like the idea of reading mail in first in, first out order, not by category (though I like reading news in category order). Please correct me if I misunderstood that portion of Paul's proposal, but I really do not want to see mail and news merged in that way.
furuta (11/17/82)
I also agree that a strict merge of news and mail would be a bad move. I don't know how many of the readers here have ever tried to sort out the important personal message stuff from all the news related articles on an Arpanet host. I think that having the news a separate entity to be read as time permits is a much preferable system to having news and mail merged in together. The key point with people trying to do things like ~v in news articles is that the functionality of the news reading and posting programs is nowhere near that of the mail reading and posting programs. I think that a real good solution (from a human interface standpoint) would be to upgrade the news posting user interfaces until they more closely resembled the mail posting programs. This would keep the separation between mail and news but provide the desired improvement to the user interface. I also think that there is a problem with introducing too much complexity if news and mail were intertwined. It seems clear to me that the proliferation of net news groups is more than many news readers want to worry about or to try to figure out. Symptoms are the net.jokes and net.misc material which is frequently posted to net.general and the tendency of some to post messages to many different newsgroups rather than to a single newsgroup. It's nice to be able to categorize things but, personally, I find it hard to remember all the categories. --Rick ...decvax!microsoft!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta (uucp) ...ucbvax!lbl-unix!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta or Furuta@Washington (ARPAnet)
derek (11/17/82)
I like the idea of merging news and mail. I would like to suggest that a person's mail be a "newsgroup" which only that person sees. Further, every person should have a way to specify the order which the newsgroups can be seen. Derek Andrew Academic Computing Services U of Saskatchewan
pavel (11/18/82)
As far as getting the functionality of 'Mail' when posting news, I don't understand why more people don't follow the suggestion in the B news manual: make each newsgroup name an alias for 'recnews' with the correct argument. We started out that way here at Cornell and the list is auto- matically kept up to date by a shell script called by crontab. The script even makes a distinction between net.* and fa.*, sending the fa.* to decvax!ucbvax!C70:<group-name>. This script also automatically cuts down the size of the log file when it gets too big. The only problem with this solution is that one doesn't get the mailer when following up articles, only the EDITOR variable in the environment. Another thing that would help is if the Mail program would accept a subject line on the command line, enabling news to put a nice 'Re:' subject on replies. Pavel
jwp (11/18/82)
I don't think I fully understand this proposal (and I may not understand it
at all). What I do understand is that here, at least, mail is used heavily
for real buisiness communications of fairly immediate importance. Anything
that in any way interfered with, or made less effective, any part of that
communication would not be used. As quick examples, any one of the following
things would render a mail system unacceptable:
Inability to get "You have new mail" messages within two minutes of the
new message's arrival.
Inability to get the header listing on startup of the mail program and at
will during its use.
News item headers intermingled with "real mail" headers.
Messages not listed in chronological order by default.
Anything that would make the startup/response time of the program slower.
Anything that would make it more complicated for the user or that would
require more thought on the user's part during use.
John Pierce, Chemistry, UC San Diego
{ucbvax, philabs}!sdcsvax!sdchema!jwpthomas (11/22/82)
I don't like it. I like to be able to see all my messages "at once" in my personal mail - at least headers. This gives me the opportunity to read those which seem most urgent first. And don't tell me to just use the mail interface to news, with the amount of news I read, that loses really fast. =Spencer
smith@umn-cs.UUCP (06/06/83)
#R:ixn5c:-50600:umn-cs:7400001:000:399 umn-cs!smith Nov 17 13:18:00 1982 I'd vote in favor of combining the netnews and mail interfaces. The two systems are doing very close to the same things for many people, and a uniform interface is only sensible. Given a vote, I'd discard "readnews" as a real lose. We've been using 'notes' here, and it's wonderful. Best is being able to scan the subject lines for a newsgroup without having to "walk" through them. Rick.