Ken Norton wrote:
> I'm about to suggest another option.
I am strongly opposed to any forum style option that I've ever seen. I
find them much slower and more awkward to use than individual emails in
my Thunderbird in-box.
I'm out at the end of the DSL coverage and Comcast (ick!) charges much
more than the telco, so my download speed is 768k. That's actually fine
for most everything. But with forums, the need to reload the browser
page for every little thing adds appreciably to the response time for
working with posts.
I personally find the forum thread paradigm clumsy at best compared to a
simple list of mail that I can instantly sort, filter or view as threads
in many ways. Searches are also fast and powerful in Thunderbird.
> I know that the "listserve" methodology has worked well for us through the
> years, but over the past year, it has gotten increasingly sluggish. It has
> degraded to the point where it is getting hard to have a functioning list.
Are you still experiencing delays? Certainly there was a problem 2-3 of
weeks ago, but Thomas railed at the ISP and all has been snappy here
since. The problem was a specific insufficiency of some sort of
resource, not some generic failure of email or listserver technology. He
also said he would consider moving to an ISP with better service if
necessary.
Turnaround time for my own messages showing up in my list in box is a
very few minutes. I assume most of that delay is due to the fact that
Thunderbird only polls gmail every 10 minutes. The list feels very "real
time" here since the last problem was corrected.
Is it possible you are proposing to fix something that isn't broken? ;-)
> Honestly, I cannot, for the life of me, understand why email is so unreliable
> in this world.
>
Jez said it - "It's all about spam. 92% of incoming mail to our company
(~4 million emails per day) is spam."
The big ISPs are desperate to keep spam under control. As far as I can
tell, all the individual problems people have had with receiving list
mail over he last few years have been a result of their email provider
blocking the server that operates the list. Some of them go the extent
of blocking a whole server based on perceived spam from one user on it.
That happened with me ages ago, so I did the simple thing and moved my
list mail to other places where I can set my own spam controls. Most
recently, gmail has been working well for me. I don't use my current
ISP, AT&T, for email at all. That way, when I move or they are bought or
sell their ISP business, it has no effect on me at all.
Note that Charlie's email address is at HCAhealthcare.com.You think they
may have aggressive spam filtering/blocking? :-)
Moose
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