Grex Oldcoop Conference

Item 359: Membership initative: Allowing members to POP their E-mail

Entered by scholar on Mon Sep 4 04:47:20 2006:

I am a member in good standing, and this is a member initative.

Here's the proposal:  members will be provided with the capability to retrieve
E-mail on Grex remotely.
22 responses total.
#1 of 22 by scholar on Mon Sep 4 04:48:13 2006:

According to Steve', this would be an inducement to potential members.

I endorse taking this proposal to vote.

#2 of 22 by steve on Mon Sep 4 04:55:45 2006:

   This would have some interesting consequences for Grex.  It might bring in
more members, but it would also be a burden on Grex, and would cost bandwidth.
I believe we get 50G of traffic a month for our current payment, so if we went
above that I think we'd be looking at another $50/mo for another 50G.  I'm
not 100% sure of those numbers, but they're in the right ballpark.

#3 of 22 by scholar on Mon Sep 4 05:07:00 2006:

I doubt allowing members to POP their mail would use up a significant amount
of bandwidth, but if this proposal passes, Grex's staff would be able to
monitor usage and restrict it if necessary so that Cyberspace Communications
doesn't get hit with an extra charge.

#4 of 22 by steve on Mon Sep 4 05:09:17 2006:

    And then halt the ability to POP for the rest of the month?  That
sounds like a good way to get folks mad at us.

#5 of 22 by scholar on Mon Sep 4 05:28:47 2006:

There might be cases where that's necessary, but I'm sure there are less
severe restrictions that could be applied.

#6 of 22 by mcnally on Mon Sep 4 05:54:31 2006:

 If you're reading mail on Grex and you're not seated at the console
 you are already reading it remotely.

#7 of 22 by scholar on Mon Sep 4 06:57:56 2006:

Mike, many E-mail programs (Outlook Express, for example) retrieve E-mail by
making a connection to a remote server and downloading stored messages to the
user's computer for reading.

Grex currently doesn't allow users to read their mail remotely in this way,
and that's what I'm proposing we enable.

#8 of 22 by nharmon on Mon Sep 4 13:29:26 2006:

Instead of POP, why not allow IMAP? I believe IMAP would be less
bandwidth intensive.

#9 of 22 by krj on Mon Sep 4 13:36:10 2006:

Proposals to provide extra benefits to members are not in line with
the philosophy Grex was founded on.   The outbound-access/membership
link is a messy historical accident and not a model we should 
return to.

#10 of 22 by aruba on Mon Sep 4 17:44:10 2006:

Re #6,7: David - Mike is pointing out that your proposal is poorly worded.

#11 of 22 by scholar on Mon Sep 4 20:05:34 2006:

Re. 10:  And I was pointing out he was wrong.

#12 of 22 by cross on Mon Sep 4 22:39:59 2006:

Regarding #2; I no longer by the resource/burden argument: grex has resources
to spare since moving to the PC platform and into colo.  Before suggesting
that allowing POP access (for the only 1000 or so users who actually use grex
for email) is going to swamp our network connection, I'd like to see some
numbers.

Regarding #8; Yes and no.  IMAP provides facilities for retrieving parts of
messages, whereas POP isn't so great at this (or generally isn't used in that
way), but typically, mail remains on the server, and at the end of the day,
to get the entire contents of the message, no matter how you access it (via
POP, IMAP, or an MUA on grex itself) you're still sending largely the same
bits over the wire.  Of course, if you're working with lots of attachments,
it may many some difference since the protocols one would typically use to
download binary attachments are somewhat more efficient than the encodings
used in email messages themselves.

Regarding #11; No, it's not that well worded.  Why make enemies by quibbling
over language, when you're actually making a decent proposal?

#13 of 22 by tod on Tue Sep 5 04:14:49 2006:

I remember when Grex ran USENET for members and it was a pretty nice feature.
Now, certain staff/members don't even want to allow POP3?  Absurd.

#14 of 22 by scholar on Tue Sep 5 04:37:56 2006:

re. 12: okay, i give up!

The official wording of the proposal is now the following:  Grex shall allow
members of Cyberspace Communications Inc. to access their E-mail via the Post
Office Protocol or the Internet Message Access Protocol.

#15 of 22 by krj on Tue Sep 5 20:54:32 2006:

Another argument in opposition:  Grex should not be making
its mail service more attractive while there are still basic 
stability problems and multi-day downtimes.
 
Essentially this proposal says Grex should move to more of a 
fee-for-service model, at a point where our service reliability
is not too good.

#16 of 22 by tod on Tue Sep 5 22:59:51 2006:

I agree.  I think proposals should be better focused on soliciting staff
volunteers that know how to patch systems.

#17 of 22 by nharmon on Tue Sep 5 23:35:17 2006:

That is a good idea.

#18 of 22 by cross on Thu Sep 7 23:55:04 2006:

I don't think we should patch.  We should move to a more stable platform. 
OpenBSD ain't it.  FreeBSD is.

I really wish, in retrospect, that I'd pushed harder for FreeBSD.

#19 of 22 by tod on Fri Sep 8 07:02:08 2006:

I think Grex should be a flat YABB cgi script running on some 3rd party ISP's
web service.

#20 of 22 by krj on Fri Sep 8 18:17:16 2006:

That's one possible future path.  However, my strong belief is that 
online communities are intimately wedded to their software interface,
and if you make radical changes to that, the old community breaks
up and you have to start over.
 
I don't believe you take away the open-Unix model and continue
to have this Grex community.

#21 of 22 by tod on Sat Sep 9 00:39:50 2006:

This community needs a health & hygiene program.

#22 of 22 by cross on Sat Sep 9 04:21:58 2006:

This town needs an enema.

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