ka (04/12/83)
There are two ways of making ARPANET mailing lists available to USENET. One is the group use of an "fa.all" group. The other is to gateway the mailing list directly into a "net.all" group. The advantage of the latter approach is that it makes the group look exactly like a regular newsgroup. The problem is that it differs from a regular newsgroup in one important respect: to the best of my know- ledge there is no way to reply to one of these articles. A while back somebody confessed that they always used the followup command to reply because they had been having too many problems with mail. I suspect that the problem is that he tried to reply to articles gatewayed from the Arpanet too many times and finally gave up using the reply command even on normal groups. The "fa.all" groups, on the other hand, are clearly marked as not being normal groups. Furthermore, articles are frequently grouped by subject by the moderator and messages such as "Please remove me from this mailing list" are deleted. The biggest argument against the "fa.all" method of gatewaying is that people prefer to see their articles individually. However, release 2.10 will deals with this problem by providing a "digest" command to break digests into individual articles. In short, I vote for the "fa.all" method of gatewaying ARPANET mailing lists. Comments? Kenneth Almquist harpo!houxm!spanky!ka
msc (04/13/83)
I vote for putting Arpanet news into fa.all newsgroups. Attempts
to followup to fa.all messages can be blocked (and are at this site)
by the recording mechanism which suggests you mail direct to the
gateway (eg ucbvax!info-term). Also most of these groups are in
digest form and the editor has got rid of annoying messages
about add/drop from the list etc. News 2.10, as was mentioned,
will get rid of the problem of having to scan a lenthgy digest
to find articles of interest.
However, I wish the generous people who act as gateways would
make sure that only one copy of an article gets through the
gateway. We often receive multiple copies of the fa digests.
fa.human-nets (from brl??) seems to be the worst offender. We
always seem to receive 2 & 2/3 copies of this digest. (This has
just happened with digest V6 #23). fa.telecom is another group
from which we receive multiple copies. The digests are so long
that multiple copies really waste disk space, cpu time and
transmission time.
Mark Callow
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