Re: browser new mail count
* On 2006.03.03, in <20060303191910.GA9556@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
* "Paul Walker" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 10:59:11AM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
>
> > Ignoring the issue of storing duplicate messages taking up extra
> > space, how is sharing IMAP folders better than simply creating mailing
> > lists and putting the right people on the right lists? I can't see
>
> With mailing lists, if you weren't on it when the message went out, tough
> luck. With a shared mailbox, you can come along later and still see what was
> going on - whether this problem has been seen before, whether this user has
> a habit of deleting all their mail, that kind of thing. :-)
>
> That's about the only advantage I can see, really. I'm not sure it's a great
> one over mailing lists, particularly since you should be able to access
> archives via the web.
... Which universally sucks, by the way, particularly for digging around
for specific details.
I used to sit on the "just use a mailing list" side of this fence, but
after years arguing the point I finally switched sides. What it comes
down to is behavior models, not technology. Technically, it doesn't
matter much -- you can achieve the goal either way. In the end, what
matters is providing a model that fits how people want/are willing
to work. As an IT organization, I can only shape that so far. If
people want to see a plain old mailbox view of something whose state is
shared with a set of others, I can't really ever sell them (and their N
coworkers) on just adopting a different behavior. And I've tried, oh.
My last effort to resolve this split was to connect an IMAP server
to Mailman archives, thus creating a shared folder out of a mailing
list. I thought that was fairly interesting/effective, personally, but
it didn't garner much interest from the Mailman community or from my
bosses, so I don't have much sense of whether that suits many users'
patterns.
--
-D. dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx NSIT University of Chicago