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    To discourage phishing, trackers, exploits and other nuisances, only plain-text emails are allowed and HTML is rejected. This improves accessibility, and saves bandwidth and storage as mail is archived forever.

    Security through simplicity!

    This seems a great tool beyond free software mailing lists.
    Add something like pk signature checks on incoming emails and you have a new federated social system.

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      I’ve read the README twice and I’m still confused. Why would you use or need this? Is it decoupling of sending an receiving mails to a “list”? This lets you send to the list without being subscribed and read it via not-email? Did I get that right?

      Also:

      If a reader loses interest, they simply stop syncing. How is stopping syncing of NNTP easier than unsubscribing?

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        These seem to be the advantages:

        • Browsing messages that were sent prior to your subscribing to the list, with a better interface (native nntp reader) than the usual web archives.
        • Keeping track of a discussion on a high volume list for a little while without having to subscribe, set up mailbox filtering, and later unsubscribe.

        However to be fair, some mailing lists already do provide mbox files of the archives that you can download and browse with a local email program.

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          Thanks, especially that second point makes sense. What I usually do is make a bookmark on my bookmarks bar for that and delete it again after a week or month. But I do that so rarely that it’s a good enough hack.

          Also I wonder if now (hey, it’s 2018) the amount of people actively using NNTP isn’t such a low number that this is kinda moot. Also I always get the vibe of ML-hate not from people old enough to be staunch NNTP fans, but from younger people. So are the “MLs are ok, but NNTP is better” folks really even less than the “I only use NNTP”, both hardly noticeable against something else? ;)

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          I consider this a feature:

          git clone --mirror https://public-inbox.org/meta/
          

          It creates a local copy of the mailinglist named “meta”. The local copy contains all the metadata you may need to restore the “meta” mailing list if it gets censored, for example.