Re: How to subsribe to a general mailing list?

["Adam Sjøgren" <asjo@koldfront.dk>]

Durand writes:

>     Adam> Yes, if you have an mbox file, you can browse it in Gnus
>     Adam> e.g.  by using G f in the *Group* buffer:
>     
> Thanks for the information.  That is exactly what I want!

Great!

[Traditional subscription to a mailing list]

> I hesitate to do this because I don't want to store the mailing list
> in my mail inbox.

What people usually do is to "split" (filter) email for a mailing list
into a separate "group" (folder).

> If I subscribe to the list, then the only way (that I know) to remove
> the mails from my mail inbox is to delete them. But, what if I want to
> read the unsubscribed mailing list again in the future? Re-subscribing
> to the list won't send me the old mails again. So I need some way to
> read the entire mailing list.

That's the situation where Gmane is handy - as it is keeps being
subscribed to a mailing list regardless of whether you - or anybody else
- is reading it, so it has all the emails back to when the group was
created in Gmane.

[Being in control]

> I mean I do not have the ability to freely manipulate the contents on
> the server.  For example, I have to request to add some mailing lists
> to the server.  How am I in control of that?  What if I want to
> subscribe to some mailing list that I don't wish others to know that I
> want to subscribe to?

Ah yes, in those cases using a public service is out of the question.
But then you have the problems you mentioned above instead :-)

> Moreover, if I later don't want to subscribe to the mailing list,
> could I remove the list from the gmane server?

No - you can unsubscribe (and forget about the group), but somebody else
might be reading the mailing list via Gmane - if you could remove it,
you'd annoy anybody else who subscribed to the group in the meantime.

> why can users add arbitrary mailing lists to the server?

To me it feels very much like a "I would like to use this myself, so I
built it. Maybe others would like to use it as well, feel free to do
so"-project. Although I don't know what Lars' motivations were/are.

As long as it isn't abused, it's a nice service and a neat solution to a
problem shared by a bunch of people.

> I think the server only has a limited amout of spaces, so that the
> user can only add a limited amount of mailing lists to the server?

There are only a limited amount of mailing lists on the internet.

And the emails on those lists are (mainly) written by people. People can
only type so much.

Plus: have you looked at the sizes of harddisks these days? You can
store a _lot_ of emails in a couple of terabytes.

> Or does gmane know some alchemical magic to handle an unlimited amount
> of subscriptions to mailing lists?

Luckily there aren't an unlimited supply of mailing lists, and there
aren't an unlimited number of mailing lists that people are interested
in reading through Gmane.

So although resources aren't unlimited, neither is the need for
capacity.

I would guess that storage was much more a problem in the beginning of
Gmane (20 years ago!) than now :-)


This discussion has become only tangentially Gnus related, it might make
sense to switch to the gmane.discuss group on news.gmane.io? :-)


  Best regards,

    Adam

-- 
 "This piece is about the inadequacy of traditional         Adam Sjøgren
  imagey and symbols to convey meaning in today's      asjo@koldfront.dk
  world."