Re: [LI] difference between newsgroup & mailing list

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Dec 25, 1999 at 11:14:59PM -0700, Sitaram Chamarty wrote:
> A news server will keep all its news available to its clients
> (individual users) who access it using software like slrn or tin
> or trn or Forte Agent.

slrn is a great newsreader - except for being a little pedantic
about > 80 column lines. Has anyone figured out how to disable
this (mis?)feature ? It's especially irritating when you want
to post a URL and slrn forces you to break the line.

> 
> Mailing lists, on the other hand, go to individuals.  You have to
> acttualy join a list to get messages from it.
> 
> There are lots more differences of course, but this should cover
> the major ones.

Another way of looking at this is from a network bandwidth perspective.
Mail "pushes" the data into your mail server. News is closer to the 
"pull" model. It initially gets headers only and downloads articles
on demand. Also, if a large number of users use a single news server,
outgoing network bandwidth is conserved. You can think of your 
news server as a cache of frequently forwarded emails.

	-Arun

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