> A long digression, I'll admit, but that's an SMTP/MTA issue that even > people who know what they're doing aren't able to cleanly fix. How is > a piece of software supposed to deal with it? Don't push messages in the first place? > > Mailing lists made sense back when everyone wasn't on the net full time, > > or even directly connected to the net at all, (UUCP, FidoNet, Bitnet, > > Compuserve...) but it really doesn't anymore. > > Dial-up users still exist. Even if we assume that everyone on this > list is online full-time (which I think is highly unlikely), we're a > highly-technical segment of the population here and can't be expected to > represent the average joe in that aspect. Not to mention that, until we > have ubiquitous public wireless coverage, my laptop isn't (and won't be) > on the net full time, even if my other machines are. Red herring. Any decent mail/NNTP client does 'offline' mode these days, whereby they will mirror a mailbox/newsgroup on local storage. There's no reason to be 'pushing' thousands of duplicate messages around the 'net anymore. Clients can 'pull' whenever it is convenient for them to do so . Its pretty well established at this point that "pushing" is not a good way to go about mass distribution on the modern internet. Pull is how the web works. And look at how successful PointCast, Marimba and Netcaster were...