Email as push technology

In response to Jason's worries about disseminating information on a public listserve that is of great value to a few, but little value to most:

There is a fine line between spam (i.e., unsolicitated information) and useful targeted information dissemination. Further, some messages may not necessarily be relevant for all, or even desired by all, but for the sake of "inclusiveness" we carpet bomb everyone with the information. There are not a lot of great alternatives, blogs and websites might not be checked frequently enough, while email is too intrusive for all but mission critical information. The best method is likely an email to RSS service (they exist, although I cannot remember any company names), such that an institution (I'm looking at you FIMS) can set up. So, all that is required for the sender is sending an email (like a listserve) to an email address. The receiver subscribes to whatever RSS feeds he/she are interested in, and then views the feeds in an RSS aggregator. The RSS feed is still a push technology, like email, but it is conceptually distinct. Email is best used for person to person contact, and does very poorly when it is scaled into other purposes (such as team communication, or mass information dissemination). Pull technologies (web, etc) excel at team communication and mass information dissemination because multiple schedules can be maintained (i.e., check the web site when you want), browsing is possible, aggregation is possible, and given reasonably intelligent technology the information can be dynamically shaped to the user (e.g., web sites using cookies). RSS is distinct from email because it is designed with widespread dissemination in mind--it comes in separate from targeted (personal) email, yet it is still pushed.