[ih] Email reliability

[John Levine]

According to Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history <stewart at serissa.com>:
>Perhaps there is an opportunity for a new mechanism that acts like an email list but isn’t implemented that way.
>
>Some possibilities:
>
>* RSS, with the email user agent retrieving new messages.  
>* IMAP, with the email list implementing a list-accessible imap server with the group’s traffic.
>
>A subscriber would periodically fetch new messages and the user agent would provide a UI in which list messages show up in your inbox.

A piece of software that periodically fetches messages from an IMAP
server is called a mail program.  You probably have access to several.

If you want to read any of the IETF's mailing lists, rather than subscribing to them, you can
tell your mail program to add an account on imap.ietf.org (anonymous/your email is fine for credentials)
and subscribe to the folders you're interested in.  Works great.  The IETF has configured its lists so
if you have ever been subscribed to any of them, you can post to all of them, so once you're known to
the system, you can reply to the list messages and it'll work.

Thunderbird also lets you subscribe to RSS feeds, which works as well as the RSS feeds are forwatted,
some better than others.

You forgot NNTP.  It still works fine for the newsgroups that people that remain active.

R's,
John
-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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