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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!nntp.crl.com!pacbell.com!tandem!zorch.sf-bay.org!scott From: scott@zorch.sf-bay.org (Scott Hazen Mueller) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: mailing lists vs. news (WAS: Linux vs. FreeBSD) Date: 25 Jun 1995 16:05:55 GMT Organization: At Home; Salida, CA Lines: 50 Message-ID: <3sk1h3$7g3@gazette.tandem.com> References: <3qfhhv$7uc@titania.pps.pgh.pa.us> <3sdm7m$fh@park.uvsc.edu> <3sfcvp$12n@pandora.sdsu.edu> <3sjsod$kn6@ivory.lm.com> <3sjt17$3i6@hydra.msgi.com> Reply-To: scott@zorch.sf-bay.org NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.150.103.17 >In addition to the overhead difference and oftimes cost between >setting up a TCP connection and setting up a UUCP connection, >many people can only get the latter. Hence mailing list can >get to far more people than newsgroups. News run quite nicely over UUCP, and UUCP runs quite nicely over TCP/IP. Furthermore, news over UUCP is usually batched and compressed, thus reducing the comm impact quite considerably over either NNTP or mail. On the other hand, smail 3.1-style batched SMTP can be compressed and would be competitive with news. On the third hand, hardly anyone runs bsmtp. However, mail works better than Usenet for several reasons: (1) You can get mail even if you're on "foreign" networks such as BITNET or Fidonet. (2) It's not very practical to get Usenet if your provider doesn't carry it. (It is possible, iff you have a TCP/IP connection and you can run a UUCP over TCP connection to a third party that provides your Usenet feed.) (3) You are most likely going to set mail up anyway, and all of the software comes standard with the system. News system administration is considerably more complex. (4) It's harder to get a news feed than to get a mail feed, or at least it was in The Olde Days when I did that stuff. (5) A news feed has to be managed in response to votes that rename or split the group(s) you want, if you have a small partial feed such has been proposed earlier in this thread. A mailing list split is easier to cope with and does not require assistance from a third party (the newsfeed provider). (6) Mail is frequently faster than Usenet over slow links, for a variety of reasons (Usenet batching adds latency, news spools are often busier and slower than mail spools, UUCP feeds usually give priority to mail). (7) Usenet volume (overall) doubles now annually, thus cost doubles at about the same rate. An individual hierarchy generally does not double at the same rate, since a portion of the growth is in new hierarchies and groups, but each area does grow. Mailing list volume growth (empirically) is much less extreme. (8) Usenet wanders off into irrelevancies considerably more often (again, empirically) than mailing lists. Source of my information: experience in all of the above, since 1987. -- Scott Hazen Mueller | scott@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG or tandem!zorch!scott