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- Newsgroups: comp.misc
- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!mcdchg!chinet!les
- From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
- Subject: Re: group mail software
- Message-ID: <BzEvrs.y2@chinet.chi.il.us>
- Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
- References: <1992Dec10.220409.41003@wap.oau.org> <185@ima.com>
- Distribution: usa
- Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 16:14:15 GMT
- Lines: 28
-
- In article <185@ima.com> kehres@ima.com (Tim Kehres) writes:
- >In article <1992Dec10.220409.41003@wap.oau.org> bdixon@wap.oau.org (Bill Dixon) writes:
- >: I am looking for some software to create and manage a "mail network".
-
- >Actually, to me at least, this seems like a problem much better suited to
- >news than mail. All you really have to do is to define your own top level
- >group, and propagate it within your company or user group. Advantages are
- >that the software and transports are already in place, can communicate
- >individually through email, ..... , and all the other normal arguments for
- >using news.
-
- Maybe, maybe not. The only real advantage to news is that it keeps one
- copy per machine and may have a more efficient transport using compressed
- batches. If your user base is distributed such that you often only have
- one interested user per machine then the advantage disappears. Plus,
- email goes to many more machines than news. If you receive email locally
- but have to connect elsewhere to read news on-line, then the advantage
- goes to email. All you really need for a mailing list is a hub machine
- to host it that is running a mail transport that knows how to expand a
- list of addresses. It helps if the mailer is smart enough to group
- addresses with the same "next-hop" destination. Smail3, sendmail, and
- mmdf can do that, and at least the first 2 can be set up so the
- system address list or alias can include a file maintained by an
- unprivilaged user.
-
- Les Mikesell
- les@chinet.chi.il.us
-
-