http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060211-6161.html "Google last night revealed their plans to offer Gmail service for third party mail servers. Currently in beta, the service will allow mail server operators to essentially hand the reigns over to Google's Gmail cluster." The details have not been announced yet, but I think this could be something for Grexers to bounce around in their head. Could Grex outsource its e-mail operations in order to save it?38 responses total.
I wouldn't be in favor of this. This would basically require users to use the Gmail interface to check their mail -- we're not in the business of providing web-based email.
Well, since the details have not been released yet, I do not think I can form an opinion on whether this would be a good idea for Grex or not. But, assuming it allowed POP3 access like Gmail, that would accomodate Grexers using text-based e-mail clients, no?
Sure -- but, again, I think that would be just us contracting Google to provide POP3 email service for us, when it has historically been our policy not to provide it. I think our prior policy has been a good one.
Which policy, again?
Read the FAQ (!faq); about 45% of the way through is "How do I read mail with Netscape or Eudora?"
I would not use gmail and I would spend a lot less time in the conferences if I could not also use grex email. I detest webmail. It is ridiculously slow and not designed for keyboard navigation.
What if the e-mail could be downloaded through POP3?
gmail allows that, doesn't it?
(I assume that's addressed to keesan, but ...) I think that unless you could put some restriction on it to make it *only* downloadable to Grex, and not viewable through webmail (that is, unless you just outsourced our spam checking), I think that would encourage users to make Grex a mail drop rather than a community -- *not* a good idea. Besides, I don't think Google would take us without some restrictions; after all, Gmail has a hoop you have to jump through to get an account, as do the other systems the article mentioned (colleges give accounts only to students, staff, and possibly alumni), while we don't.
ric slipped.
I would not want to use pop mail. Shell account mail is much faster, you can ignore the html parts, which tend to triple the size of mails.
I don't understand. E-mail that is delivered to a webmail system, and then downloaded to a shell system using fetchmail would be almost identical to e-mail delivered straight to the shell system. I really do think Grex is going to need an overhaul of its e-mail operations. We have some time to think of how to go about this. If Google isn't the solution, so be it, buts lets not eliminate it just because it isn't the "old way of doing things".
Re. 9: Since when is Grex a community? /etc/passwd currently has about thirty thousand entries. The current Agora, which should be one of the most popular conferences on Grex, has 1036 people listed in the participant list. However, that's at least several times greater than the number of people who have actually entered anything into the current Agora or at least read it extensively. If the choice is between scrapping E-mail entirely and providing E-mail service through Gmail, rather than locally, providing E-mail through Gmail is clearly the ideal choice for the aspects of Grex which actually have something to do with community. Re. 11: You're an ignorant cunt. What nharmon is proposing would allow you to access mail through the shell and allow you to filter out anything you can filter now.
By the way: only 0.18% of the entries in /etc/passwd have felt committed enough to Grex to become members of the corporation.
Re #12: I agree that Grex needs an overhaul of mail operations. I just don't think a web-based or POP3 solution would fit with the stated aims of Grex. Re #13: Grex has been a community since it was founded in 1991. It has had noncontributing members (in the nontechnical sense of both words) for nearly that long. Some of those noncontributing members have since become contributing members. If the choice is between providing email through Gmail and not providing it, I think the latter is clearly the choice more in line with Grex's historical principles. We are *not* a mail drop. #14: And look at the percentage of American citizens of age who vote. If this ever becomes a viable option, we need to *put it to a member vote.*
Taxation without representation.
Regarding #13; And of the people who are participants, only 82 have actually posted something. Regarding #15; I think you're confused about what the suggestion is. It's to use gmail as a mail server, with grex as a client to it, not to offer popmail or anything else. Personally, I don't think it'd make a significant difference in usage patterns. And while some ``noncontributing members'' have become ``contributing members,'' in the past few years, more the number of ``contributing members'' has halved. Grex really does need to think seriously about how it does things and reconsider some of them. I doubt that it will, however. The community is just too insular and backwards.
Re #17: How would you use Gmail as a server with Grex as a client *without* offering popmail? I think Grex needs to deliberate on these issues, but it needs to not forget the principles it was founded on. I think that "insular and backwards" as noncomplimentary epithets don't reflect positively on the person using them; it lends an air of change-is-always-good. I'm not saying that all change is always bad, but some is.
Using "insular and backwards" the way cross did doesn't at all imply he thinks ANY change is good, let alone that change on GREX would be good, let alone that ALL CHANGE is good (which is how you deliberately and condescendingly interpreted post). Anyway, to prove your strong thesis that some changes are good and some changes are bad, you should offer more examples, I think. For example: It would be good if you shut your ignorant mouth and allow yourself to benefit from people who actually have experience as system administrators.
I didn't say that was what he'd meant, merely that it left that impression. Grex is a community governed by its members. Final decisions are made by the members, not by the administrators.
It didn't leave any such impression, and you should stop sticking your junk into people's mouths without their permission. Grex being governed by its members doesn't mean that technically naieve users should assume they know more than experienced Unix system administrators and should refuse to accept reasonable guidance from them. I don't know why you're contorting my post into one that has anything to do with the formal social hierarchy of Grex. I value the input of cross more than yours, even though you're a member and he's not.
Regarding #18; Well, the grex mail clients would be POP clients to Gmail's POP3 servers. That doesn't mean that grex would act as a POP3 server to anyone or anything. Would that mean that users could read their grex email by polling gmail directly? Yes, but so what? The argument against grex never offering pop service was only tangentially about the community. It was also about bandwidth and capacity: if grex offered this service, it would be deluged with users looking only for a mailbox with a cool name. I contend that if grex used gmail's services, (a) that issue would go away since they'd be using gmail's resources, not grex's, and (b) those users more interested in a mailbox than grex would just go directly to gmail anyway. Does it need to be debated? Yes. Does the membership need to decide things like this? Yes. Does it need to be dismissed out of hand because it leads to a contradiction to an FAQ question written easily 10 years ago? No, it doesn't. That said, is grex likely to give anything other than the status quo any serious consideration? No, probably not. That's what I mean by insular and backward.
Re #22: Using Gmail as our mail server wouldn't free up any resources except bandwidth for those users who decide to use POP3 clients from elsewhere, and users who use only email would take up disk space for home directories here. I still think we would get a minor deluge of users if we offered POP email with open newuser. Users who can't get a gmail account (or don't want one because they have to jump through a hoop to get one) would go to us. To an extent they do already, which is why I think adding a few minor hoops to email access on Grex is a good idea, but the problem is exponentially greater with the addition of web-accessible email. (It wasn't about "a cool name.") The issue wasn't about bandwidth, it was about what Grex was going to be: an online community made possible by computer conferencing, or a Hotmail competitor. The former was chosen, and I for one am glad of it. I had to cite the FAQ (which have a last-updated date of 2003, not 1996, btw) because this has been so generally accepted that there's no precedent in the history of member votes.
re #22: remember folks, if you don't agree with cross 100% you're a
backwards idiot!
You really know how to win friends and influence people, don't you?
Regarding #24; You really do know how to misinterpret someone, don't you? But it's just that sort of ad homimun, ``I don't like you so I don't like what you have to say'' and ``You're saying something different from what others say so it must be wrong'' bullshit that I'm talking about. But hey, thanks for making my point for me! Regarding #23; That's actually not true. You'd cut down on most of the spam, for one. If you think there'd be a deluge of new users looking for gmail access, then at least tell me *why* you think that? Any statistical data to back it up? Do other shell services offer POP access (I don't know, but think that sdf might)?
Re #25: I've heard that many online services won't accept Hotmail addresses because they're used so much for spam. I think that's due to two factors: open access and POP access. And I don't think it would much cut down on *outgoing* spam. Incoming, maybe, and I'm all for cutting down on incoming spam, but I don't think outgoing would be hampered much. Gmail's success has come from access control (they say in their "why you have to have an invite or use SMS to get an account" document). I'm not sure, but I think that to get POP access to your mailbox at SDF you have to validate. (I'm not sure because I never got CLI POP/IMAP mail working on my Linux box, and I don't like GUIs much.)
i'm very mad at all of you.
i'm an angry chicken
Just encountered this item and looked briefly at the link about it that Nate provided. I realize that the details are sketchy at this stage, but if it's the case that users would still have to log into Grex and use Grex's local email clients to access mail provided in this way, it certainly wouldn't violate the philosophy embodied in our FAQ statement and might save staff some major administrative headaches. Once details are available, we'd have to take a close look before going this route, of course.
I'm not necessarily opposed to outsourcing something like e-mail (though I can't quite figure out who would want to do it for us for a price we'd accept) but I'm not wild about handing it to Google for privacy reasons. I'm still not clear on what their policy is about archiving e-mail on their Gmail service or about what information they might choose to make available to advertisers in the future.
Those would be my concerns as well. Google is now officially inviting participation in beta testing of this service. https://www.google.com/hosted/Home
I think that google doing it would more or less eliminate some of the liability issues grex worries about with respect to email.
Assuming there are privacy issues with Google, don't we already accept a lack of privacy on Grex? We're told that Grex is a poor place to hold private information.
We're told that Grex is a poor place to hold private information because it makes no guarantees that the data will survive, not because of privacy concerns -- as I understand it.
There are also privacy concerns. Grex could be broken into and could have information compromised by an attacker, or grex may become the target of government investigation due to its open nature. As far as I know, the latter has never happened except that grex was served a subponea once for someone engaged in credit card fraud. It was satisfied and the matter closed as far as grex was concerned. Even in our ultra- paranoid, government gone wild (show us where the taxes come from, baby!) US-centric world, no one has ever expressed a major interest in grex. Therefore, I personally feel that the privacy concerns are overblown. As for the latter, grex has had security problems on the supposedly ultra-secure OpenBSD that it just didn't fix for a year or more at a time, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone had compromised it. In particular, at one time, an unprivileged user could `cat' a terminal device in /dev, and when someone telnet'ed to grex, could then see the user's data as they typed it to grex. In particular, user names and passwords were easy to steal that way. It's unclear how many accounts were compromised that way, or whether any of those accounts could be used to leverage greater access (e.g., did someone `su' while someone was cat'ing their terminal?). So, a reasonable user should expect no privacy from malicious users who may break into grex, but privacy from prying spook-like spy eyes is probably not a big concern, or at least shouldn't be. In particulr, if mail were outsourced to google, it'd probably be about as secure as it is now.
Absolutely.
I think its a great idea. Grex does not have the resources to fight widespread email spamming. The email spammers could be the end of grex. This is a way to solve the problem
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
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