[amsat-bb] Slack vs. eMail -- The medium is the message

[Martin Cooper]

> Again, speaking personally, I would just phase-out the email aliasing
> service.

That would be a huge problem for many of the people who use it. Just taking
away the e-mail alias itself would mean breaking countless links around the
web - for example in many years of e-mail archives across numerous
discussion lists, where people could no longer reply to the author of a
message they found in those archives. Also, e-mail addresses are used for
much more than just sending mail. They're used for account ids on websites,
account ids in source control systems, account ids in bug tracking systems,
and much more. And in the ham world, using your callsign is perhaps a more
common means of id than your name, so having callsign at amsat.org is an easy
way for people to reach you. (No doubt someone will mention @arrl.net as an
alternative, but that requires membership in ARRL, and not everyone is, or
wants to be, a member of that organisation.)

Martin.
KD6YAM


On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 4:55 PM VA7KBM via AMSAT-BB <amsat-bb at amsat.org>
wrote:

> Hi Joe,
>
> My apologies - I didn't mean to state the obvious, or make light of any
> technical or operational difficulties with respect to email.
>
> Personally, I haven't used groups.io enough myself to either recommend
> it or not recommend it, but I can imagine the tagging and group-like
> features of groups.io might bridge the gap between those AMSAT members
> who like traditional email lists and those who favour more of a
> conference-like system. Other members may have had more in-depth with
> groups.io or other systems and be prepared to champion one system over
> another.
>
> Again, speaking personally, I would just phase-out the email aliasing
> service.
>
> Thanks to you and everyone else at AMSAT for all your work!
>
> 73 Ken VA7KBM
>
> On 7/16/2020 9:54 AM, Joseph B. Fitzgerald wrote:
> > Ken,  VA7KBM wrote:
> >> ... AMSAT should consider a more modern email list system.
> > Presently the IT crew is working on migrating our servers off the
> existing Linux distribution which goes end-of-life in November to Ubuntu
> 20.04 LTS.    This will result in a change to GNU Mailman 3.0 ... more
> modern but not exactly a quantum leap.   Now would be a great time for a
> fleshed out proposal for something else since it would be hard on the users
> to switch again in another year or whatever.   I have looked at groups.io
> a little bit in the past, and it seems to be run by "good guys".    Don't
> wait for "AMSAT" to consider alternatives, you guys are AMSAT, so put
> together a good proposal and convince people.
> >
> >> ... It's generally not a good idea
> >> for most small organizations to run their own email servers these days -
> >> too much security and technical overhead, and who needs that?
> > I surely don't need that and I am one of they guys that directly deals
> with that overhead.   That being said, an issue that trips me up every time
> I look at having someone else run things is the e-mail alias service we
> provide to anyone with a callsign.    We have somewhere around 16,000 users
> of that service and I know of no economically viable way to do that except
> on our own servers.
> >
> > de KM1P Joe
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