On Fri, 25 Jul 1997 13:57:38 -0600, John Chadwick
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>We have had a gateway to the Newsgroups for several years now on Museum-L. This
>gateway was setup so that users could access the postings with having their
>e-mail box fill up.

LISTSERV offers Digest format (1 big msg per day of all postings) or Index
format (topic/subject list only, order msgs by index#) which is very
similar to reading newsgroup headers and selecting only certain articles
for download.  Msgs to users can also be sorted/filtered by defined TOPICS
to limit mailbox fillup.

>With the new browsers such as Netscape and Navigator being able to download
>mail from a server, sort by threads, filter messages, etc., I am wondering if
>the concept of a gateway to the Newsgroups is even viable anymore.

LISTSERV also offers a WWW interface to list msgs (archives really but that
is almost realtime).  Many newsgroups are in the process of shifting to a
moderated format to reduce spam/UCE posts.  In many cases this is
implemented with the users needing to email a posting to a special address
for processing by the moderator (whether person(s) or automatic program)
which is functionally no different than posting a msg to a maillist.

Also, many people (yes even AOLers) can access email and may not be
familiar with newsgroups or may not have the capability to access them.
How many such people are in your interest population (New Mexico Museum of
Natural History) is another question, but pertinent if you include some
interested people internationally.

Seems to me usenet has a big problem to overcome the spam, but those tools
are already in place with a maillist approach.

You could continue to send one-way through your gateway, but migrate people
to the list approach.  Who makes up your newsgroup population (primarily
academics, corporate,etc) and how do they like to use their systems?
--
 ________________________________________________________________________
 Ben Parker ............ (Oak Park IL) .......... [log in to unmask]