E-mail Newsletters Switching To RSS 244
prostoalex writes "The wide spread of unsolicited e-mails is leading publishers and site owners towards subscription-based RSS, the InternetNews.com article says. Chris Pirillo from LockerGnome is quoted saying that people just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters anymore, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer. This short article on About.com also argues for the RSS as preferred format for newsletters, site headlines and all sorts of updates that were e-mailed to customers before."
Somewhat good. (Score:4, Interesting)
The only good thing that I can say will come from this is the fact that it will be much easier to distinguish spam from newsletters - however, this is a temporary solution, because the Spammers will easily have enough resources to learn how to generate false reports.
Also, it's going to be tough to get everybody to switch to it, and it still won't fix the spam problem.
But anything that tries to put a stop to Spam is ok, as long as it's not rampant blacklisting.
Re:Somewhat good. (Score:2)
you have to set your RSS reader to go to the rdf file. It doesn't arrive unsolicited unless you're looking at an aggregated feed.
Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
When I first complained that SpamAssassin blocked their newsletter, and merely asked if they could look into it, I was laughed at, and they tried to convince me that I needed to whitelist them or, in their words, "...learn how to use your spam blocking software".
Ironically, months later, they signed up for Habeas signatures [habeas.com] on their emails.
It's interesting that NOW they decide to look into RSS as a solution. I wonder if it is because Habeas isn't working.
hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
The possible problems with this is that spammers may set up fake sites that you might want to subscribe to for a newsletter, and then feed you spam. Of course, you c
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:2)
both have their uses, but RSS is for real in corporate communication.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
True at the moment, but as soon as more people get used to using rss readers, or they are built into desktops/menubars/launch docks/etc., this method might become the preferred means for most people to subscribe to lists and newsletters.
The other difference (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, there is a real future in RSS for genuine advertisers selling desirable product. People like informative, relevant, targetted adverts, especially in pull media (thus not having to put up with intrusive marketing databases). After all, what else is the typical opensource app's web site but informative, useful brochureware?
Re: Conditional Gets save bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Conditional Gets save bandwidth (Score:2)
Depending on the frequency of newsletter issues, it's entirely possible for that to work. Less of a problem if you just post short summaries and provide the full text on a site somewhere (with a link in the RSS entry).
Re: Conditional Gets save bandwidth (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, if N=1 it's all good. Then either you get 200 bytes or 200 bytes + size of <item> + surrounding RSS elements. Not too many RSS files have been that small from what I've seen, but it would certainly make it almost push-like, which I still see as the god-like ideal.
I guess it comes down to the question, do you use mail routing to deliver your mail straight to your house, or do you use fetchmail from the house? If you perfer fetchmail, then you probably prefer RSS. If you would prefer to have
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
What is syndication, but a "subscription" to something that is available to the public (or a limited subset thereof)? Pull or push (as in email) mechanism, doesn't really matter.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
"Subscribe" by using an aggregator program or something else that polls that RSS feed
I personally keep up with
Re:hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, it doesn't look like a problem until every single user on the Internet is doing the same thing, and then you realise it might be better to have a real pub/sub system i
Re:hmm (Score:2)
People, this is why you need to support Jabber rather then AIM, MSN, or ICQ; sure, in the short term more of your buddies may be on those (closed, proprietary, evil) services, but in the long term, w/ Jabber everywhere, the apps get a lot, lot cooler!
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Matters a lot. (Score:5, Informative)
For example a web page is "pull" meaning that you have to request it in order to have it. You know the address of the server you request info from.
An email is "push" because anyone can send you email if they know your address.
Pull is better in the sense that it permits you to only accept communication from the publishers you selected. You could do the same for email and only accept mail from ppl and publishers in your address book for example but in some case you do want "unkowns" to contact you. Whereas you positively dont want "unknowns" to contact you regarding "newsletters" and such.
You might say then that we would be better off then reading the "newsletter" (or whatever) off the publishers web site. The thing is that RSS enables you to aggregate all those items from different sources together as opposed to going to all the websites.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:2)
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:2)
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:5, Interesting)
Just say no to web boards and use a moderated mailing list or Usenet group. Actually, I don't see much spam on my ISPs news server, so they must do a good job filtering - completion on the text groups is good too (no idea about binaries).
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:2)
But seriously, What is your specific beef with UBB?
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:2)
Hell, Slashdot is guilty of the same, but thankfully it's sparse on the glittery features and has more configurable options than most web boards.
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:2)
Yes and no. When I want a computer question answered well and with alacrity, I usually avoid congregations of computer illiterati. On the other hand, when I have a question about non-geek stuff like home maintainance, construction, etc. the best forums are on web boards.
The definition of ironic (Score:5, Funny)
Posted to slashdot
Re:The definition of ironic (Score:2)
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:2)
m3 t00. What *is* it with them? As near as I can figure, whoever wrote the first one had no experience with decent email or news readers, and just grew it out of a guest book or something. And then everybody cloned it, without really thinking about it.
I'm in the process of writing a web forum program myself, partially because a lot of people don't like or understand mailing lists. But I'm trying to do it *right*. It's going to resemble some
Amphetadesk (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the home page : amphetadesk [disobey.com]
Re:Amphetadesk (Score:3, Informative)
I stumbled across a 3-pane reader that I like MUCH more than a web page interface.
Try SharpReader [sharpreader.net] if you are are a Windows person. Worthy contender, IMHO.
Re:Amphetadesk (Score:2)
Sharpreader: flawed, promising (Score:2)
Re:Amphetadesk-Painful. (Score:2)
Still, maybe they'll see your comment and improve it.
Newsgroups (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Newsgroups (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're talking about a web-based newsgroup, then the only way to effectively moderate it is to register users, which means giving out an email address, and you have that whole "providing an email address just to get spammed" issue again.
If you're talking about a restricted NNTP server, then you have the issue with 1) people actually knowing what NNTP/Usenet is, and 2) people having to deal with multiple NNTP
No content, but wants control (Score:4, Insightful)
As for RSS, what are they proposing? Will they have a web site that aggragates for us? No thanks - I don't want to see unrelated advertising, nor do I want to have to put up with their quirks or have their layout and styling applied to everything I subscribe to. Netscape tried this with their portal, and I didn't find it very compelling. Alternatively, are they going to make us install a client application that aggragates? That will face some resistance too, as well as the normal platform specific issues. MSFT tried this with IE4 - it was gone by IE5. I guess not enough people signed up to the channels.
I think email is still the best medium, and will remain so for many years. Portals are dead, and that's all an online RSS aggregator will be.
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen some of the opt-in lists. I've been on a few, despite not having opted in.
If you tell me that there are 1.7 million people in the entire world willing to be put on an opt-in advertising list, I call bullshit. The "Opt-in" lists as they exist now get subscribers by surreptitiousness (putting the "you will be added" on page 43 of a contest agreement form), deceit ("By not failing to have clicked in the position indicated, you are agreeing to not rescind the option to be excluded from..."), and flat out fraud (adding people who didn't ask for it, and claiming they did).
That's how opt-in lists work. If you've got 1.7 million people on one list, then that's how you work, and that makes you a spammer.
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:3, Interesting)
So that's the politically correct word for spam these days?
A lot of the complaints for spam I get at work are things that people signed up for and didn't know it meant they would be getting ads every other day. A lot of it is local clear channel radio stations, if you want to be a "preferred listener" and be elegible for contests you have to get on their spam lists.
That said, I have little reason to believe you are a real spammer. I've noticed that real companies lately generally
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:2)
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:2)
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:2)
Newsletter - Sales material
Product updates - Bug fixes
Third party promotions - Spam
Sorry dude, while you appear to be making some effort to do the right thing (confirmation email and so on) you're mixing th good with the bad. If I downloaded a commonly used mainstream app - which your must be if you have that many folks who "opt-in" - I probably want updates. But I don't want to be hasseled by salesmen and spammed by people you've sold marketing rights to. Make your choice - Are you a software company or
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:2)
damn spammers ruining everything (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:damn spammers ruining everything (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the post office would happily collect your $370 million in postage (minus whatever the bulk mail discount is) and send the letters to their destination. The only thing that keeps postal junk mail in check is that the sender pays, unlike spam where the recipient pays.
How many people actually use RSS Aggregators? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people actually use the web? (Score:2)
If those same 10 people switch to IPv6, and perform normal activities, odds are they will never run into each other, and gain no benefit from the switch.
Aggregators grow in value directly proportional to the number of people who support it, linearly or quadratically, but people who don't support it do not harm the system
How does RSS scale? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I do question the ability of RSS to scale. Think of a scenario where millions of users need to poll hundreds of thousands of sources to check for updates on the feeds. How much unnecessary load does this pose to the network and servers? Is RSS really the best way to do it? Wouldn't we be better off with web based forums, or moderated usenet newsgroups? Or yet, extending email with the concept of task-oriented e-mail addresses -- which accept content coming from a defined set of servers only?
In principle, push methods seem a lot more efficient for this kind of content distribution.
Re:How does RSS scale? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How does RSS scale? (Score:2)
Or if your XML server has proper caching system, like AxKit [axkit.org] which I use to make my simple weblog software AxBlog [simonwoodside.com].
simon
There is no push (Score:4, Insightful)
RSS must put a lot less load on the network than me checking out the CNN web page 2 or 3 times a day to see what's going on.
Re:There is no push (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There is no push (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How does RSS scale? (Score:3, Informative)
You must have some serious reservations about the scalability of HTML, then
RSS is just a way of paraphrasing the content of an HTML site, in a standard way that can be incorporated into other websites/clientside RSS readers. Reloading an RSS file once every hour is less bandwidth-intensive than reloading the HTML counterpart every hour.
Re:How does RSS scale? (Score:2)
In this case, it might make sense to combine HTTP and BitTorrent technologies. HTTP is *very* instant, BT is *very* efficient, particularly with large amounts of bandwidth.
However, using checksumming (a la sha1) would all but guarantee that you get an accurate fe
Realization at last? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Realization at last? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Realization at last? (Score:4, Informative)
The whole point of RSS is that, unlike email, it is not push.
In fact, "push" vs "pull" is not very descriptive. You have a newsletter, a publisher who controls the content, and subscribers who read it. There is only one important question: where is the subscription recorded?
There are effectively three models:
My pet theory is that there is another method that fits in the third category: email retrieved directly from the publisher's system by the subscriber's system using POP3. I subscribe to the content by adding an account to my mail client with the publisher's POP server, and a username of my choice. Doing a "get email" on my mail client will bring down the newsletter along with my other email. (IMAP or NNTP could be used the same way). The advantage of this over RSS is that the clients are already widespread, although ideally they would be enhanced to support this model more smoothly.
Re:Realization at last? (Score:2)
eliminates an obstacle to digital postage (Score:5, Informative)
Some objections to this have been (1) how do you process the payments without giving control over the internet to some evil corporation? (2) it's impractical to redesign the e-mail protocols and infrastructure, (3) mailing list operators can't pay to send every e-mail. Well, #1 is obviated by schemes like hashcash, where there's no real money involved. Re #2, this RSS example shows that the e-mail infrastrucure can and will be replaced, and there are ways to do it without having to make everybody change over to a new system overnight -- it can be done piecemeal. The RSS system may also show that #3 is not such a big deal, because maybe newsletters shouldn't go through the same channels as e-mail. (Note that the US postal service doesn't deliver newspapers.) Also, #3 was kind of silly anyway, because people can have a whitelist, and exempt people on their whitelist from paying to send them e-mail.
Re:eliminates an obstacle to digital postage (Score:3, Informative)
newsletters != mailing lists (Score:2)
Unclear on RSS, explanation? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people want to buy or download yet ANOTHER program for their communication needs? We already have AIM, MSN, ICQ, YIM,IRC, five different proprietary video clients, and newsreaders. If using a web browser, who wants to visit twenty different websites to read their mailing lists(Yahoo Groups is bad enough isn't it?) On top of that, email still must be dealt with.
I can understand the benefits of it I think: Locked down feeds presenting a huge hurdle for spammers, XML for flexible programming, and a download as you go structure(like newsgroups).
I like email lists the way they are personally. I find spam to be easily identifiable so I don't lose tons of messages like the article mentions. I don't know if I'd go for it if it's like blogs. Email lists can get off topic, but blogs seem like they're always rambling. I've looked at the blogs of the people that belong to mailing lists I'm on, and there's no way they'd ever replace the email list.
Anybody care to give a good explanation about RSS?
Re:Unclear on RSS, explanation? (Score:2, Insightful)
RSS Via Jabber (Score:5, Insightful)
You can publish almost anything as a RSS feed, for instance URL's mentioned on an IRC channel.
When combining technologies such as these you can get some real neat stuff happening. Sometime I want to write some scripts using naive bayes to sort out the RSS information I'm interested in vs the stuff I'm not and then have it subscribe to lots of RSS feeds
A combination of methods (Score:5, Insightful)
I run a website (The View From The Ground [viewfromtheground.com]) that uses an email newsletter that monitors what the city, police, and other agencies are doing in Chicago public housing (the projects) because there is absolutely no public accountability. We don't spam, don't release our email list to anybody. We're very disciplined about the privacy of our list.
We've thought about going to RSS, but there are big advantages to using an email newsletter for such a purpose.
While our email publication is "unwelcome" in places like the police department in the sense that they rarely like what we have to say, everyone from top administrators to low level officers read it because it scares them. There have already been several successful lawsuits and many major news stories (in the Chicago locals like the Tribune and Sun-Times and some nationals like the New York Times) that generate public scrutiny.
Now, imagine people at the police department or the Chicago Housing Authority, whose technical proficiency is often, uh, lacking, setting up an RSS reader and subscribing to our feed in order to receive our publication. Further, email is easy to forward, and we often get feedback that reveals a long and sordid chain of forwards until it reaches the person in question. We have received amusing lawsuit threats (one from a major company president for "deflamation") with such histories attached. RSS feeds don't have the same forward-ability as email.
Not all email that is received in a spirit of hostility is spam, and sometimes, even if the receiver hates the message, they have to read it. But that's only if they get it. RSS significantly raises the barrier of entry, particularly for people without lots of Net savvy.
This isn't not to say we're not working on implementing RSS. We are, and expect it to dominate the friendly/sympathetic side of our distribution list once we implement it as a distribution method this fall.
The point is that email is still a killer application of the Internet for distributing journalistic content, and that RSS and email can coexist in a mutually beneficial way.
I hate to say it, but the only way we'd become RSS exclusive would be if the next version of IE (which may not appear for years) ships with a super-easy RSS feed reader because almost every city agency in Chicago is MS-exclusive. Until then, we'll do both.
Re:A combination of methods (Score:2, Informative)
Agreed. However, I would point out that Microsoft has recently started offering RSS feeds [microsoft.com]. If they find it to be a useful technology, I'll bet we'll see an RSS aggregator integrated into Outlook or MSIE. If that happens, the barrier of e
Listservs will never die (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Listservs will never die (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Listservs will never die (Score:2)
Re:Listservs will never die (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean like this [userland.com]?
and then go convince everyone to support it in their servers.
No, only people who want private RSS files need to support it in their servers. And it's not like HTTP autentication is some sort of mystery, all reasonable web servers support it out of the box. After all, guess what, it's part of HTTP/1.0 [w3.org].
But first, you might want to think about how auth will interfere with RSS discovery (which is already screwed up enough).
Easy, it doesn't. Either you can get to the RSS feed or you can't, either way the aggregator has to handle it (people type in wrong URLs all the time, for instance, so any real aggregator has to handle errors).
You seriously overestimate the difficulty of this. Unusual, usually people underestimate difficulties. I hope you aren't a professional coder.
Re:Listservs will never die (Score:2)
But anyway, you know damn well that RSS discover is poorly implemented, your average user i
Re:Listservs will never die-Flip flops. (Score:2)
I'm merely pointing out obvious problems in RSS distribution control. RSS was never designed for control, it was designed for free, unfettered distribution. Listservs automatically have distribution control. And your point was...?
People just don't subscribe to email newsletters? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I check my email, it's nice to know that everything that comes in (short of spam) is targeted specifically at me. The newsletters, however useful and informative, tend to be lengthy and not the sort of thing I often have time to read when I'm trying to read and reply to my personal emails.
I realize the standard answer people give is to set up mailbox rules so the newsletters get tossed into their own folders. Sure, I can do that (and have often done so), but then I end up with a huge folder filled with overwhelming amounts of text to sift through. If I don't get time to read them for a few weeks, a lot of it ends up getting mass deleted. (It's not usually important enough to justify a marathon reading session to try to catch up with all the back messages piled up in there.)
I think of newsletters as publications, so as such, they're best published to the web - so viewers can access them at will. Don't take up everyone's disk space sending out hundreds (or thousands?) of copies of the same newsletter via email.
Web-based readers? (Score:2)
Re:Web-based readers? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/
Essentially creates "newspapers" of RSS feeds you are interested in - great product.
Re:Web-based readers? (Score:2)
I set it up for our web designers who needed a way of putting newsfeeds on a site they were building. It handles caching etc, and just puts the rss content into an a php array for you to display how you like.
good stuff to read? (Score:3, Funny)
So what does the Slashdot crowd recommend?
Email lists were never a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Email lists were never a good idea (Score:2)
Lists have a privacy aspect that is kind of nice. Usenet is too public for some things where a list can stay nice and private under the radar. Isn't it easier to control distribution and new content via list compared to usenet group?
Of course, forums are a nice alternati
RSS is a great idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
RSS is a relatively new creation, especially in terms of popularity and I think there are a large number of geeks like myself that will definitely like being able to pull the few newsletters or lists we like. Especially if they pull headlines and still make you request delivery or actually visit a web site.
I personally have loved watching readers (aggregators) develop and mature, as well as more sites coming online with content for them. I think this is certainly one of the things to watch as it is morphing the way we use the web.
Kind of like the evolution of blog style web sites that report news and commentary, so I don't have to hit the estimated 50 billion hardware review sites each day just to see what they have been playing with. Used with a
And yes, if it is popular Microsoft will probably make a stand alone reader or more likely bundle it with IE or Outlook Express.
ironic... (Score:2)
I subscribe to the InternetNews daily newsletter and I heard about RSS through it. I guess Pirillo should be glad about that.
Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the real lesson isn't "email bad, rss good", but that RSS has the nice property of allowing the user to select how she would prefer to access the resource in question -- maybe as email, maybe in a custom web page via Amphetadesk [disobey.com], or maybe in a special purpose application such as NetNewsWire [ranchero.com]. For that matter, maybe they'd like receiving info on a non-traditional device, such as a PDA or video game console, and RSS feeds can be more adaptable than other channels.
Personally, I like email, I've got processes for handling a silly volume of it, and the ability to get RSS feeds I'm interested mailed to me on some kind of schedule appeals to me -- even though the idea hadn't occurred to me before this weekend.
So the next question for me then is, for those of you that like RSS but don't care for email, how would you prefer to access such data? What software are you using today? What problems, if any, do you have with the way your RSS aggregator works? What properties would you like to see in such software tomorrow?
Disposable (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Disposable (Score:2)
http://www.lockergnome.com/issues/win95nt/2
When that appeared in their *email* newsletter Sneakemail
got quite a few hits.
Re:Disposable (Score:2)
Looking to try an aggregator? Try Bloglines (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone remember Pointcast? (Score:3, Insightful)
Stating the Obvious: (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya know, I remember in the early days when there was no WWW, and listservs were considered a killer app. It's no different today, many people want an internet connection just to access and interact on specialized lists. Let us hope that this never goes away. The internet is not designed for us to all subscribe to the same RSS feeds, the internet is designed for us to talk to EACH OTHER.
Re:Stating the Obvious: (Score:5, Insightful)
Email lists are the quintessential example of this phenomenon.
Putting up web pages may be easy and cheap enough to be an option for everybody, but it doesn't provide the same level of interactivity as a mailing list can. A world in which everyone can be a producer as well as a consumer is not the same thing as a world in which everyone can be an equal participant. The latter is what we have, where the former is what replacing mailing lists with RSS feeds would give us in even the best case.
Mailing lists are delivered to the users' own mailboxes, at which point their data becomes unavailable only when the recipients decide to delete it. Web pages, on the other hand, are stored on central servers and are thus vulnerable not only to network outages but to gratuitous changes made server-side by webmasters, as well as other sorts of problems. For certain types of content (advertising newsletters would be a good example), this is not a meaningful limitation because the content itself is worthless if it's out of date...but that does not describe the sum total of discussion on mailing lists, and it does not make sense to introduce such unnecessary vulnerabilities.
RSS is good for what it's designed for...but please let's not try to throw away a working technology and substitute a kludged one in its place.
Dealing with mailing list spam (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly though this is often the case. The solution however is simple - create a different email address in your domain for each newsletter or company that you sign up for (for example "ticketmaster@mydomain.com") and use this for transactions. When the spam starts arriving (you WILL get spammed if you use ticketmaster by the way - read the ToS) then redirect the address to the relevant abuse email. Voila - the people responsible for the spam report themselves.
Livejournal (Score:4, Informative)
You can see the results at http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/news
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/c
Customised email client the answer (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a sensible direction to go in. Legitimate bulk email needs to move to a model where the subscriber rather than the publisher controls the subscription, and RSS is one such system.
The problem at the moment is the low spread of RSS clients/viewers (I have never even seen one).
Another subscriber-controlled method of publication would be for each subscriber to have a mailbox on the publisher's system, accessible with POP3 (or IMAP or even NNTP).
This has the advantage that it is workable with today's email clients that everybody already has -- you just add a new POP server and username into your client config.
It is not ideal with most modern clients, but it works, and the clients can easily be enhanced to make it easier to add another subscription and have the messages dropped into your main mailbox for viewing.
RSS via NNTP (Score:3, Interesting)
nntp//rss [methodize.org] is a nice tool for reading RSS feeds with your favorite newsreader.
IMHO this is a good replacement for (mostly) read-only mailing lists: it is much easier for the average person to set up a web forum with RSS than a NNTP server or even a (self-hosted) mailing list.
For interactive mailing lists, Gmane [gmane.org] is the tool of my choice.
Disadvantages of email (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
That's not necessarily the issue. Instead, I think, lots of people just don't want to have to deal with separating the newsletter they want from the spam they don't want. And lots of others might be afraid their email address will leak (be sold) to a spammer. Unique mailbox addresses to sign up with might help, but most people don't have these nor know how to create them.
In some cases, signups to legitimate newsletters or mailing lists are failing because they are hosted by providers that have had, or maybe still have, spammers operating, and some ISPs are blocking them. Other disadvantages of email include the hassle of having to do a confirmation cycle (switch to the mail program) to sign up.
RSS seems like an interesting solution, but it's basically a one way feed although you can hyperlink to a web submission form if the newsletter provides two-way communication. Many have suggested NNTP (running isolated from the global USENET) for the more discussion oriented mailing lists. And another option is for the mailing list operator to host the mailboxes (stored shared) with access via IMAP. Perhaps integrating all of these into a web browser will make it all work better. Oh wait...