Shrieks wrote:

Just floating a trial balloon. Are you tired of the high traffic on the cypherpunks list and having to wade through a ton of mail every day? Any of you folks approaching your 5M limit from archiving too many messages? Well, I am and I don't really want to start paying for the extra memory.

I ruthlessly cut out messages I don't want to keep, but still have accumulated about 60-100 MB of Cypherpunks mail that I wish to keep (not as mail qua mail, but as articles, essays, comments on crypto points, forwarded items, etc.. Obviously I have this stuff on my home machine. My point? Netcom's "5 MB" limit is useless for actually archiving articles, as it probably should be. At some point one has to download the accumulated stuff. A 5 MB buffer is better than a 1 MB buffer, but not in the steady state solution. Conclusion: The remote vs. local storage problem has to be resolved in any case, so why not solve it sooner rather than later?

I was wondering if it might be worth petitioning the netcom sysadmins to start up a local newsgroup (eg. netcom.cpunks) that serves as an archive for the mailing list. That way one gets to use the abilities of <insert favourite threaded news browser here> to keep threads together and so forth. I'm sure there are enough netcom subscribers to warrant this.

Netcom expires _all_ newsgroups, even its own ("netcom.*" local discussion groups), in the "normal" period of 2-3 weeks. There is no reason to expect them to make an exception for our group. If this is not made an exception, then a 3-week hang around period will hardly constitute an "archive." (Yes, it will reduce _some_ storage, by a shared pool, but only temporarily.) Netcom might be persuaded to create a persistent storage for a discussion group like ours, but I know of no precedents (at Netcom). They would want to be paid somehow for the space used, and arguments that users would not have to pay extra for the above-5MB storage would not be very persuasive to them. (Unlike MIT, for example, Netcom has little incentive in this area.) Convincing them to create another class of service or pricing would be tough, I think. I have no objection to the idea of this, and the general idea of converting the list into a newsgroup (alt.cypherpunks, or soc.cypherpunks, or even rec.flame.cypherpunks) comes up. I just don't think the argument that it saves disk space is very persuasive. At some point the stuff one wants to keep needs to be on one's own machine, right? (There may be some list members who lack a computer, and are accessing solely via terminals. Can't do much for them.)

Just a thought. Pheedback?

--Tim May, in his third year of using Netcom with the Cypherpunks list. -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo@toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tc/tcmay