I got an email suggesting our lists be registered with gmane.org. Gmane is a mailing list to newsgroup gateway. Does anyone know anything about this? I queried the fellow who suggested it and the answers to my questions are below. Tim
Would gmane subscribers be able to post to fractint without being fractint members?
You can choose whether people are allowed to post through Gmane. If you do allow Gmane postings, you can still configure your mail server to reject messages from nonsubscribers - so someone would have to subscribe to the list even if they were using Gmane to post messages. This seems a bit icky to me but some do it.
Would people's emails be exposed?
You can choose this too - Gmane has address encryption, which is real encryption rather than obfuscation. Each address is replaced with one @gmane.org, and mail sent to that address goes through a challenge-response check before being forwarded to the real address. See <http://gmane.org/tmda.php>.
What are the pros and cons of doing this?
Many people find using a newsreader more convenient than subscribing to the list with a mail client - you can see the threads more clearly, it doesn't get mixed in with your other mail (or require you to set up filters), and the messages are there for you to browse when you want. Gmane is also an archive and doesn't delete messages (although it does label those likely to be spam so you can make your newsreader skip them). This is a 'pro' for most technical discussion lists but for more personal lists some think it a 'con'.