I'm curious about your thoughts on mailing lists vs. private newsgroups. I think of email and news as just two different ways of sharing MIME messages, with the

I'm curious about your thoughts on mailing lists vs. private newsgroups. I think of email and news as just two different ways of sharing MIME messages, with the difference that email is sent to specific people and newsgroups are stored on a server and can be archived and made (semi-)public. I realize that newsgroups have received much, much less attention than email recently, and it may just be that there isn't enough software support for news to make it worth bothering with, but it does seem like a mailing list with archives is a lot like what news was trying to accomplish. (The only other big difference I can think of is push vs. pull notifications. But newsgroup readers can fetch all new messages, so I don't think that's a big deal.)