TechnoBabble

Response from Curtis Wilcox…

Good response, James. My guess is the apparent permanence of web forums relative to mailing lists is not a barrier to their use. I think the most significant barrier is a web forum is a separate “place” you have to while email is right “here” where you probably already spend a lot of your time.

This is particularly important for the less active members.

Also, every abcd mailing list has an archive available on the web so list email is just as permanent as a web forum.

https://www.abcd.harvard.edu/harvard/groups/archives/

Regarding Google Groups and using external hosting in general, I don’t think we should expose ABCD to the whims of companies offering free services.

On 6/6/11 9:43 AM, “Ian Stokes-Rees” <ijstokes@hkl.hms.harvard.edu> wrote:

• As someone (I suppose like all of us) who has too much email coming into my inbox, I need to manage when I see content from mailing lists (and a few procmail SNAFUs have made me wary of playing constantly with procmail).

I don’t have too much email in my inbox but mail rules to file mailing list email into separate boxes is a common tool that a lot of people are satisfied with. Maybe people could share some “recipes” for various mail clients/filters, including procmail, the abcd-email list would be an appropriate venue. An ABCD page could then list all the recipes to help popularize them. There could be examples of filters for putting all ABCD list mail into one folder and other for putting individual lists into separate boxes.

• Google Groups has the best archive searching and user-sidelist management control features that I’ve seen (e.g. I can subscribe to a list, but then request not to get any emails, and only review the content online).

ABCD lists already have publicly searchable archives but better list management and better web archives would certainly be welcome. I don’t think we have to outsource hosting to achieve them.