Re: Limited-access technical advice

[Jason Earl <jearl@notengoamigos.org>]

On Tue, May 03 2011, Lennart Borgman wrote:

> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 9:07 PM, Jason Earl <jearl@notengoamigos.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 03 2011, Richard Stallman wrote:
>>
>>> It was reported to me that a lot of technical advice about Emacs is
>>> requested and given in Google groups, which are only visible to people
>>> who use Gmail.
>>
>> Google Groups is mostly just a web front end for USENET.
>
> Not any more. It started long ago as that but today it justs includes
> what once was USENET. Most Google groups are not in USENET.
>
> For what it is worth I consider Google groups to be the technically
> best mailing lists I have seen so far.

That's an excellent point.  It is more accurate to say that Google
Groups is a unified front end over USENET and a whole pile of Google
hosted mailing lists.  However, there does not appear to be a great deal
of Emacs technical advice going on any of Google Groups mailing lists.

Just to be clear, you can certainly participate on Google Group mailing
lists without using Gmail.  I participate in a few Google Group hosted
mailing lists myself.  You have to get a Google account, but you have to
get an account to participate in emacs-devel as well.  Once you have an
account Google will happily send you email to whatever email address you
configure, and you can then read the mail using your customary tools (I
use Emacs/Gnus).

Google does make it a bit easier to use their email service, but you
don't have to use Gmail if you don't want to.

Jason