Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!ames!haven!adm!cmcl2!shemesh!ittai
From: ittai@shemesh.GBA.NYU.EDU (Ittai Hershman)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: trash message from usenet (BIFF)
Message-ID: <3142@shemesh.GBA.NYU.EDU>
Date: 2 Jun 90 00:17:53 GMT
References: <9006011234.AA22023@monk.proteon.com> <9006011556.AA23309@sonny.proteon.com>
Organization: NYU Stern School of Business
Lines: 20

> The TCP-IP list has been quite consitently professional in its
> conduct, as have most public Internet mailing lists.  Everything
> unprofessional I have seen recently was "gatewayed" in from netnews.

Nonsense.  Witness the recent debate on the IETF mailing list, which
is not gatewayed to netnews, on the subject of tongue-in-cheek
messages.  The "problem" is very simply the price of success -- things
were a lot more professional back in the old days before we let just
anyone (tongue is definitely in cheek here) on the network.

The real problem is that our e-mail/conferencing user-agent paradigms
no longer fit the reality of the Internet.  On a personal level, I use
e-mail pretty much for one-to-one or one-to-small-ad-hoc-group
communication, and use netnews for all mailing-list/conferencing type
activities.  This was a step in the right direction, but the
user-agents are still far too primitive.  There are some intriguing
ideas being developed in the research community and I look forward to
trying them out as implementations are made available.

-Ittai