warren (11/17/82)
Another opinion on this one. I also feel that the reception of mail and news should be kept separate. News is very high volume and very low priority, while mail tends to be the opposite. It's just too hard to wade through all of the debates to find important mail. One thing you can do, and what MIT and I believe berkeley do with this problem, is to have a tool that turns news into mail on demand. This lets you control the input, and then use your favorite mail handler to process it. "readnews -p" isn't a bad first order approximation, but the news headers are not really compatible with mail headers. I do think that the tools for composing and processing mail and news should be made as compatible as possible. My own reaction to the current mess is to compose what I want to send and then use some very simple interface to submit it. Likewise on receiving I get the data out of both news and mail as soon as possible and into an environment that will behave predictably for me (a mail processor running under my emacs). I just got burned too many times trying to reply to news or mail and getting stuck trying to type it in one line at a time with no editing. This still seems to happen with news, even when you have $EDITOR set up. Warren Montgomery (ihnss!warren)
trb (11/18/82)
Everyone seems to be saying I don't want all that news to be integrated with my important mail! I must have missed the message that said that the mail/news implementation would have to be severely brain damaged. I would welcome a cohesive screen-oriented message interface, and I'd be a FOOL to ask it to throw net.stuff into my personal mail. I just want a standard, smooth, reliable, smart interface. Keeping mail and news apart gets filed under "smart." Looking forward to the day when I'll never have to type r- again, Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491