Empeg Mailing Lists

Why?

While the BBS had interesting discusssions in its forums, I found the interface dead slow and inefficient. A mailing list is meant to end up in my mailbox where my threaded mail reader can deal with it, not a web site where you have to click and wait for every single message.

But there is already a mailing list, why new ones?

True, but it has never really caught on. The fact that it's on a commercial list server might have something to do with it, but I think the main reason is that the BBS had enough momentum that discussions never switched to the mailing list.
Of course, the fact there were links to the BBS everywhere, and pretty much no links whatsoever to the original mailing list didn't help.

So what are you offering?

I wrote a perl script that takes the botched digests that the BBS can send you and splits it into Emails that are fed to the matching mailing lists that I created on my machine. Note that this is one way only, I have no way to send answers on the lists to the BBS.
You get to choose whether you want spend the time to log on to the BBS and post your answer there, or only send it to the people who are subscribed to the list.

The threads in the archive/my feed are all broken

I know, but there's nothing I can do about it, the digest contain hardly any information at all, and no thread info at all. The digests seem to be purposely crippled to prevent what I did with my perl script.

The archives aren't complete

If you have saved all the digest since the beginning of the BBS, please send me Email so that I can feed your digests in my archives.

Why do I get nothing all day and then all the messages at once?

That's because I'm splitting and redistributing a daily digest

Why do some messages not look right?

The digests contain all kinds of weird HTML things that I try to parse and replace with text equivalents. I'm fixing most of the problems, but it probably isn't 100% perfect and can't really be.
If you're curious, look at the substitutions I need to do on those digests.

I want to do the same on my machine/How does it work?

If you'd like to do the same thing I did, you can get the script I wrote

Wny are you doing this? What are you getting in return?

More load on my machine
More seriously, if people use the mailing list, it will be populated with real Emails for everyone, and we'll have threads (In-Reply-To: header), whereas I can't reconstruct threads that came from the BBS.
However the biggest reason for doing this is that I want the empeg traffic to go to my mailbox, I don't have time to click around on a web site.
While I'm somewhat hoping that some people will switch from the BBS to the mailing lists and allow for real discussions with real threads, that's just me, subscribers ultimately decide what they prefer.

Why are some Emails addresses visible and some other ones not?

I captured the Email addresses I could find on the BBS on March 27th 2000. If you have an account on the BBS and you'd like your Email to be visible to the mailing list subscribers, drop me an Email

The lists can be found here:
Mailman mailing lists
(you can browse the list archives too, that's an option you get after selecting one of the lists (you don't need to subscribe to view them))

A few links:

• Empeg Main Site
• Empeg onelist (this list is unfortunately more or less dead)
• All Things Empeg
• List of links from All things Empeg
• Unofficial Empeg BBS

2000/03/27 (23:56): Version 1.0
2000/03/28 (17:14): Version 1.1. Added FAQ item and changed page title
2000/05/17 (23:30): Version 1.2. Added more info
2000/07/03 (16:23): Version 1.3. Updated the perl script with many new Emails, coping with the bad date format of the new digests, and added 3 new lists