[ale] What's so special about gmail invites?

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Friday 03 September 2004 08:43 am, Pete Hardie wrote:
> fgz wrote:
> > Anyone remember TANSTAAFL ?
> > (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch).
> > Yes, I beleive I'll take a pass on gamil also.
>
> I'll be using it for a great external archive.  All my ALE mail, and other
> (non-personal) lists can go there, and I can sort/search to my heart's
> content. If everything I use gmail for is already public knoweldge (mailing
> list posts, etc), I lose very little, and gain more.

Hey, I was going to say that!

I suddenly realized that gmail was good for searching mailing lists.  It is 
way better than most mailing list archives, and even better than standard 
google.  So I've got ALE going there, and a couple more mailing lists.

Which brings me to my proposal for a new business for google: archiving 
mailing lists.  Why should both Pete and me (and probably another dozen 
ale-ers) all have separate archives of ALE on gmail?  Google should offer a 
service to mailing lists.  They host the archives and let the work read them.

Alternatively, if they let me publish a read-only password for my gmail 
account, I could pass it out to everyone.  Only I could send email, define 
labels, etc, but everyone could read and search my archives.

I can't think of a good reason that google shouldn't offer such a service.  
Seems like they would use much less disk space, but still get the same number 
of page views--probably more as people learn that the archives are kept 
there.

Michael