free collaborative tools for low BW and losy connections

Sun Mar 29 12:01:49 UTC 2020

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 05:27:41PM +0000, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> nntp is a non-scalable protocol which broke under its own weight. Threaded
> news-readers are a great way of catching up with large mailing lists if
> you're prepared to put in the effort to create a bidirectional gateway.  But
> that's really a statement that mail readers are usually terrible at handling
> large threads rather than a statement about nntp as a useful media delivery
> protocol.

Some mail readers are terrible at that: mutt isn't.

And one of the nice things about trn (and I believe slrn, although
that's an educated guess, I haven't checked) is that it can save
Usenet news articles in Unix mbox format, which means that you can
read them with mutt as well.  I have trn set up to run via a cron job
that executes a script that grabs the appropriate set of newsgroups,
spam-filters them, saves what's left to a per-newsgroup mbox file that
I can read just like I read this list.

Similarly, rss2email saves RSS feeds in Unix mbox format.  And one of
the *very* nice things about coercing everything into mbox format is
that myriad tools existing for sorting, searching, indexing, etc.

---rsk