The advantages of e-mail?

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Through much of 1997 I was a passive observer on an e-mail bassed discussion list called Salaam-v-Shalom - Arabs and Jews seeking peace. The hard drive on my Macintosh filled up incredibly quickly with megabytes of messages that kept arriving in my inbox. I've mentioned this group before, and I even once offered my zip disk with about 80MB of saved discussion threads from that list to anyone who might like to study the phenomenon. Until now, nobody has taken me up on that offer.

But, truth be told, there's really no reason to renew it. The entirety of the Salaam-v-Shalom listserv can be found online. In other words, the fact that the list was distributed via e-mail meant that it was easy for me to save a number of months of incredibly repetitive discussion. But doing so was ultimately unnecessary - not only because nobody is interested in reading those discussions, but because they're available online. But of course one day the discussions will cease, and when that happens I hope that whoever decides to remove the archives from the web won't have any difficulty saving them to a CD or two. Though I'm not interested in reading them, I trust that someday someone will want to use this material for research purposes.

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Go to: on erasing an online forum.