RE: DON'T REPLACE YAHOO!

["Nikola Kasic" <nikola@xxxxxxx>]

Mark,
I agree with you in almost everything.
However, it would be shame to kill yahoo group because it's much easier for
newbies to find group on yahoo then on your site.
Also, reliability can be an issue. If your server fails, while you are on
two weeks holidays, nobody can use group, and similar problems...
Main problem here is that we have a such a variety mail clients,
restictions
and prefered methods that it's almost impossible to please everyone, and
although yahoo covers 90% of our needs, there is still that 10% of the
people that are not happy.
Main problem seems to be for the users who don't have HTML enabled mail
clients and want to receive mail in plain text format.
Since it seems that you are good in web hosting, mail hosting and you have
resources available, can I suggest the following:
1. Create one user in our group called "Mark's site Gateway".
That user
should have setting to receive every single message as a mail and put
e-mail
address of some mailbox on your mail server.
2. Then, set up rule on your server to convert that message into plain text
and forward it to the users who register with you.

That way, people can for the start receive both messages, one HTML from
yahoo and one plain text from your server for a day or two, until they are
sure that everything works fine. Once they are happy, they can go to yahoo
and set that they don't want to receive e-mail, so they'll receive plain
text from your site only.

If something goes wrong with your server, they can still use yahoo web, or
set up on yahoo to receive e-mails again.

Since every single message will end up on your server, you can even develop
some web interface, which will be better then yahoo's and without annoying
ads every two messages.

Is that feasible?

Nik

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Hetherington [mailto:mark.egroups@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 04 February 2002 21:54
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] DON'T REPLACE YAHOO!


OK, first let me list why I dislike the offerings by Yahoo, then I have a
proposal.

The original group (on Egroups or wherever it was) had an option to send
all
emails as plain text which overcame the problems HTML emails can cause. A
short while after their takeover Yahoo removed this option. I and others on
the list prefer email as text.

I am on a number of mailings lists and get a fair amount of normal email
each day all of which arrives pretty much immediately it is sent. Email
from
the ukha_d list often does not arrive at all, never arrives in any order
making following discussion extremely difficult. I might get serveral me
too
messages with no original text arriving several hours before the email they
were responding to. Other times I get every message twice. Setting up rules
or working out if a topic is worth following becomes impossible very
quickly. I have tried using a different mail server with similar results. I
am banned from list email going to my work email since yahoo have something
in the headers which triggers protection in the mail server software and
has
once locked up the mail servers while they tried to follow a rogue
instruction in the list email.

The web interface has gone from a clunky one I fought through when I first
joined the list to read the archives to practically unusable with it's
advertisements before reading messages, and taking up most of the screen
while posting messages. The search function although touted as a benefit is
very poor IMO since it can often take a long time to actually find a
message
due to it's odd way of restricting the messages searched.

Advertisments in each email get larger and larger. Often they are far
larger
than the text of emails. Obviously this is much worse in HTML but even the
text advertisements seem to be growing.

There are others, but these are by far the worst.

Since I doubt Yahoo will be fixing things any time soon and some issues are
likely to get worse as time goes on, moving the list seems to be the only
possibility.

Using those arguments for staying that seem resonable, it seems to be
mainly
functionality that people want to keep. I.e. the mailing the, the archive,
the polls, files areas etc.

I might be in a position to secure server space on a very good connection
to
provide the list and other services. I would also hope to be able to get
this at no cost. So my proposal is, if we could reproduce all features that
Yahoo offer that people like, would it be of interest to members?

Before you merely say no for not wanting to change, consider the additional
options this gives the group. There could well be a service on Yahoo that
you feel is inadequate for it's job, or other features you would like to
see
but Yahoo do not offer. With a custom solution, we can actually create the
very environment we would like. As an example, one of the first things I
would propose would be to echo the new ukha newsgroup into the web
interface
for the list so members without Usenet access could then also read and post
to the newsgroup.

There are enough people on the list with sufficient knowledge to create
such
a system. I think the concerns over bandwidth are a little overstated.
Mailing list servers do not usually issue emails per subscriber, they will
send emails to mail servers with duplication instructions to keep bandwidth
requirements down and speed of transmission high.

I would like to get some feedback before pursuing this firther, so, would
people consider a move that resulted in no loss of functionality while
hopefully providing improved services over those offered by Yahoo for the
same low (i.e. zero) cost?

Mark.