The Usenet vs. mailing lists

In this writeup, I try to provide a few clues about why one would prefer to use a (Usenet) news group instead of a mailing list. This is an article I wrote initially to support the migration of the gopher mailing list to the comp.infosystems.gopher Usenet group.

So, why is Usenet better than a mailing list?

First I have to say that “better” is probably not the correct term. “different”, yes. For a small project that will run over the course of a few months with a bunch of people - I’d say go with a mailing list. If we’re talking about a subject that spans over a few years (decades even), with an uncontrolled amount of subscribers, then Usenet is the way to go.

Myself, I value the fact that Usenet is a truly public place. When a new subscriber gets the list, he can get the history of past messages right away. A mailing list doesn’t allow such thing (or it requires to go through a clumsy web-based portal, if the mailing list provides such tool at all).

Resiliency: Usenet is a network of meshed NNTP servers. Should a few servers go down, no big deal, nothing is lost. Should the mailing list server go down, you’re fucked. This gets me to another point:

Persistence across time. Sooner or later, the mailing list server will cease business. What then? “Migrating” the users to another mailing list provider. In the meantime, all past messages are lost from the internet. With Usenet, this doesn’t happen.

The killfile is also a feature that I enjoy much, and pretty much every news reader implements it. Sure, you could probably emulate it with cryptic rules in some mail programs, but it’s a mess.

Separating mail from public forum. Not everyone cares about this, but I do. I like to receive on my mailbox only things that I am supposed to answer. Messages coming from a public forum are distracting me in times when I have more essential things to attend to.

Spammy additions - most mailing lists like to add some ads to the messages that are posted by users. I really hate that. If I post something, I want it to be delivered exactly as I typed it, without additional crap.

Finally, I choose what I want to read (and fetch). If I’m not interested in a thread, I mark it as ignored, and its messages won’t even be downloaded to my PC (headers only) - while with a mailing list I am forced into getting all the stuff.

Interested? Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Mateusz Viste