[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How to run an old-school mailing list?
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Ask HN: How to run an old-school mailing list?
I'm not talking the newsletters that are in vogue these days. I'm
talking about about the classic mailing lists that are common in
the open source world, where you reply-all and everybody can chime
in on a topic. I am considering starting one with a select few to
talk about software and our side projects, to brainstorm and talk
shop, without the urgency of chats like Discord or IRC, and with
much less friction than a regular forum. I find I have no patience
for these, while email is king and doesn't demand immediate
attention. My questions are: - how hard is it to run a classic
mailing list? How to deal with spammers, etc? - is there any kind
of good mailing list cloud service? Or is running it on my own VPS
the best approach? - is GNU Mailman still the gold standard? Is
there something more modern? Also, in case this idea of a mailing
list to talk and brainstorm with fellow programmers sounds
interesting to you, send me an email. I don't want this to be a
huge thing, but just a place to share cool code, ideas and
discussion with a small group of people, with no urgency and at our
own leisure.
Author : sph
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-03-22 08:52 UTC (14 hours ago)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Looks like most of the ones I'm on use mailman.
| igor47 wrote:
| i run several mailing lists for my community. it's a pain. of all
| my self-hosted projects, mailman 3 gives me the most ongoing
| trouble. it's a very complicated piece of software and it's
| running in an increasingly hostile internet. i literally just
| spent an entire day finally setting up ARC and learning arcane
| things about how DMARC and SPF validation will still fail when
| you've ARC-signed your mailing list messages, but it's okay
| because lots of providers (really, gmail) will give you "points"
| for the ARC signing, but also you still should enable conditional
| DMARC mitigations in case the sending domain has a very
| restrictive DMARC policy, at which point mailman 3 will munge
| your From headers making list replies get all janky and confusing
| for all your non-technical participants.
|
| i don't want to be on a mailing list for a bunch of random
| unrelated people who don't know each other and have no reason to
| be civil to each other. mailing lists for shared projects make
| sense, and mailing lists for people who otherwise are somehow
| engaged in community. a mailing list for random people sharing
| cool ideas honestly sounds it will either totally die, or will
| first become really controversial and THEN totally die. even in
| my social circle, some of the mailing lists i ran were torn apart
| by politics and people splintered off to start their own mailing
| lists without the people with "problematic" opinions, only to
| learn that the "problematic" opinions were what fueled the whole
| shebang.
| sph wrote:
| Thank you for your perspective and sorry for the silly
| question: can't stupid people be booted from a mailing list? I
| assume well-intentioned spammers to get around any ban, but I
| imagine an invite-only mailing list can be told to drop
| everything sent or received from a particular email, no?
|
| My naive hope is that a mailing list with 10 strangers will not
| devolve into utter chaos immediately. It might fade into
| irrelevance, sure, but that is just how entropy works.
| igor47 wrote:
| yes, a community can be cultivated. it's okay okay if it's
| just a moment in time and is meaningful for some and then
| people move on, it's also okay/wonderful if it takes off and
| becomes a haven of sanity and togetherness. i'm sorry if i
| came off as too jaded, i don't mean to dissuade you from
| trying, and i'm glad you're thinking about it!
|
| feel free to ping me if you want more technical tips, or if
| you want to use my mailman instance instead of trying to
| shave that particular hairy yak.
| sph wrote:
| Maybe if you have an easily-accessible list of best
| practices to run mailman, I'd love to know. I won't lie to
| you, hearing you talk about DMARC and SPF makes my hair
| raise already, I hate dealing with SMTP, and I hoped it
| would be possible to set Mailman up leveraging third-party
| platforms (i.e. Postmark, Mailgun, etc.) so I wouldn't have
| to deal with that nonsense.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _can 't stupid people be booted from a mailing list?_
|
| Of course. If you're the BOFH of the whole thing, you don't
| even need to get anyone else's approval.
|
| But if you _do_ want the community to weigh in on who 's
| "stupid" and who's not, then suddenly you might discover that
| three out of your ten members actually think that the person
| in question is a genius and is holding the whole thing
| together. Four members might think that booting anyone out at
| all runs counter to the purpose of your mailing list. Two
| people will privately email you and the "stupid" person,
| trying to somehow play both sides for no reason you can
| comprehend. One person will say that if anyone gets kicked
| out, they'll leave two.
|
| And all those numbers may overlap!
|
| Moderation is hard.
| evandale wrote:
| That sounds easy to solve - tell them to go pound salt. If
| it's a private mailing list where you're judge, jury, and
| executioner why would you cater to people who are looking
| to cause problems? Let them leave, there's a billion more
| people out there to join your list.
|
| Moderation is easy. Moderating without hurting the feelings
| of anonymous strangers is hard.
| devilbunny wrote:
| The list is basically dead, has been for a while, but in
| its heyday had a very effective moderation by mockery and
| abuse: The Cult of Father Darwin
| (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3209&cid=1412491).
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _That sounds easy to solve - tell them to go pound
| salt._
|
| Then your life becomes easy, because your mailing list
| becomes empty.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > [...] _mailman 3 gives me the most ongoing trouble. it 's a
| very complicated piece of software and it's running in an
| increasingly hostile internet._
|
| Given that Mailman 2's code was heavily written with Python 2.x
| in mind, and Python 2 was officially deprecated, I _kind of_
| understand why the maintainers felt it would be easier to
| rewrite things from scratch... but I think Mailman 3 suffered
| from a form of second-system effect [1] as it seems way more
| complicated than MM2.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
| lathiat wrote:
| Mailman is most common, however discourse also has a mailing list
| mode which allows people to get involved and reply by both email
| and web.
|
| Your biggest hurdle will be email deliverability.
| perlgeek wrote:
| My experiences, though a few years old, boil down to this:
|
| * Spam isn't really a problem if you only allow members to send
| mails to the list
|
| * Moderation effort really depends on the size. If you have 10 or
| maybe 20 well-behaving members, no moderation effort at all. If
| you 2k people getting into vim-vs-emacs flamewars, good luck...
| bkummel wrote:
| Don't. There are more modern and superior solutions like e.g.
| Discourse. I don't see why people should use old-fashioned things
| like mailing lists in 2024.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| Is Discourse easily searchable from the outside? I was looking
| up transaction behavior in Postgrsql last night. I came across
| such an old school mailing list. The utility was that it
| appeared rather high in the search results.
| bkummel wrote:
| In my experience, Discourse forums do appear high in search
| results as well. The added benefit is that they have a good
| UI to read old threads, unlike mailing lists.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| discuss.python.org comes up in my search results, sure.
| donalhunt wrote:
| The OpenStreetMap community decided to go the discourse route
| after a review of requirements and options available.
|
| See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Community_forum
|
| Talk about discourse for OpenStreetMap:
| https://www.youtube.com/live/VkZJd-4C1Ws
| ajb wrote:
| Reminder: 'modern' and 'old-fashioned' are political epithets,
| not measurable quantites.
| gkbrk wrote:
| Discourse has terrible UX compared to other online forums and
| even mailing lists.
|
| Your claim that it's superior needs to clarify exactly what is
| superior about it.
| sph wrote:
| I do not have to time to hang about in forums, nor to idle on
| Discord or IRC.
|
| E-mail, on the other hand, is a constant. I can snooze it, read
| it on Emacs, file it with custom rules, deal with it however I
| want. It doesn't require any particular app, any particular
| form of formatting, it doesn't give me points, badges, weekly
| recap emails, or require me to upload an avatar.
|
| I feel mailing lists are underrated, and reading from this
| thread, it's mostly because the software to run them is as
| intuitive as Sendmail.
| soegaard wrote:
| Note that Discourse can be used in "mailing list mode", so
| you don't have to leave Emacs.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Set up a Google group.
|
| They're free mailing lists.
| sph wrote:
| I'd rather not depend on Google and their UX is terrible, but
| it's a good shout nonetheless.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Set up a Google group._
|
| Is it actually possible to sign up with a non-Gmail account?
| Because I've tried on a couple of lists, and it never seems to
| work.
| Sprocklem wrote:
| I have successfully signed up to a google group with a non-
| gmail account, although I had some difficulty finding the
| instructions for doing so.
| b800h wrote:
| This reinforces their control of internet standards, and
| they're not free, you're paying with your data.
| dano wrote:
| I'm on a list or two that are run through https://groups.io/ and
| it works well. I also run a few private mailing lists on mailman
| and am loath to ever apply patches to that machine - it is
| complicated to set up, but works fine once done. In a greenfield
| implementation a docker installation might be better
| https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/install/docker.html
| sciurus wrote:
| Seconding https://groups.io/
|
| I'm in a number of amateur radio and computing groups there,
| and it works well.
|
| From the creator: "I've started three companies. I started
| ONElist, an email groups service, in 1997, and it was acquired
| by Yahoo in 2000 (where it was renamed Yahoo Groups). I started
| Bloglines, an online RSS aggregator before Google Reader was a
| thing, in 2003, and it was acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2005. I
| started Groups.io, an email groups service, in 2014, and I
| still run it." - https://www.wingedpig.com/about/
| sph wrote:
| groups.io looks good. But are they all public lists? Is there
| an option to have a private one?
| time4tea wrote:
| I used mailmanlists.net for a few years and it worked very well.
|
| (No association)
| t312227 wrote:
| hello,
|
| fwiw ... personally i still use GNU mailman - but version 2, not
| the more current version 3.
|
| why!? idk, version 3 seems unnecessary "bloated" in comparison to
| the older and "somewhat" easier-to-use version 2.
|
| but for a new setup, i would definitely go for example with mlmmj
| - i'm even considering migration to it from my aging mailman2
| setup :))
|
| * http://mlmmj.org/
|
| [disclaimer: i've used djbs ezmlm back in the days ... and i'm
| still a big fan of his software / approach to software.
|
| but over the years keeping it running / maintaining it was a bit
| annoying, so i switched
|
| * https://cr.yp.to/ezmlm.html
|
| :]
|
| just my 0.02EUR
| quesera wrote:
| Thanks for the link to mlmmj !
|
| I agree that ezmlm was the high point of mailing list software.
| :)
|
| mlmmj looks like a properly-conceived modern option to consider
| though!
| bbarnett wrote:
| https://github.com/jaredmauch/mailman2-python3
|
| Haven't tried it yet.
| ale42 wrote:
| I'm working with mlmmj since a few years and am happy with it.
| Some functions that edit headers (like prepending a text in the
| subject) should not be used in environments where users can
| have mailboxes everywhere (not just on your local domain)
| because it invalidates DKIM signatures...
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Semi-related question: Is mailman still storing passwords in
| plain text?
|
| I remember a time, not that long ago, where I regularly got mails
| from mailman telling me my current password.
|
| Of course, people should never reuse their passwords anywhere,
| but people still do. Back then I looked into the topic and
| getting mailman to encrypt passwords wasn't simply changing a
| setting.
| cageface wrote:
| I struggled with a few different solutions for this and finally
| just settled on an alias on my existing fastmail account under my
| custom domain.
|
| Works fine and zero hassle. I think it's fine for the kind of
| mailing lists you describe.
| defanor wrote:
| I do not manage a mailing list, since the one I have set is not
| active, but I found Mailman 3 to be too resource-hungry, so went
| with much more lightweight mlmmj for mailing list management, and
| MHonArc for archiving. At least the initial setup is fairly easy
| with those, once you have postfix set. Probably not hard to set
| them with Exim, either, while Courier apparently includes mailing
| list functionality out of the box (though I have not tried that).
| Jhsto wrote:
| If you want to roll your own there is a mail client I have been
| using called himalaya which exposes JSON endpoint for mail stuff.
| It could be used to write a mailing list feature.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| The purpose of the mailing list software is managing
| subscriptions, etc. For a small and semi-private list like you
| are describing a simple alias/.forward is easier to maintain.
| bbarnett wrote:
| These days, due to SPF and DKIM, an email from MTA mail.a.com,
| being forwarded by MTA mail.b.com will almost certainly result
| in bounce at best.
|
| So you cannot easily have a mailing list, where 5 friends can
| email list@b.com, and each receives a copy. It'll just bounce.
| And worse, you'll get downgraded at the big boys, and then your
| other mail will bounce too.
| quesera wrote:
| One very simple option is Google Groups.
|
| But to your questions:
|
| It is not hard to run a mailing list, if you know how to run a
| mail server, and are familiar with text based config files.
| Running the mail server and sorting out DKIM SPF DMARC will
| probably take some research. Dealing with RBLs etc is annoying
| but can be accomplished if you're on a netblock with a good
| history. You probably are not though.
|
| Spam is not an issue, if your membership is invited, approved, or
| moderated.
|
| Mailman is "fine". Set it up once and it works forever. Getting
| it set up is a fair bit of work, the first time. Mailing lists
| end up being fairly complicated things, and -- at least as of the
| last list I ran on Mailman -- these things are not optimized for
| operator experience.
|
| For a very small and manually curated membership, you could just
| use an alias on your mail server. Mailing list software just
| automates sub/unsub actions, digest, archives, etc. You might not
| need any of that.
|
| These options are either fun projects, or they are headaches,
| depending on your goals. If the latter, it's infinitely easier to
| set up Google Groups. When I shut down the last mailing lists on
| my servers, most of them transitioned to GG and there have been
| no complaints from the new operators (who were neophytes).
|
| All the usual caveats about Google apply of course. Most people
| don't care.
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| I work with SPF and DMARC, and still learned things from this
| recent post on HN.
|
| https://simonandrews.ca/articles/how-to-set-up-spf-dkim-dmar...
| and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39712634
|
| It honestly isn't that bad, but it falls into that kind of
| thing you do once a year and then forget in between. Don't let
| that stuff discourage you, you'll have much bigger problems
| with humanity on a mailing list unless you commit to really
| keeping on top of the community.
| greggyb wrote:
| For a hosted option, source hut includes mailing lists as a
| feature a la carte.
| adr1an wrote:
| What about self-hosting? There's listmonk.app
| sph wrote:
| That's for newsletter, not old-school mailing lists. (The
| marketers stole our name, what the heck should we call them
| now?)
| toast0 wrote:
| Frankly, mailing lists were in existance prior to email or
| computer data processing, as in mailing
| publications/advertisements/pricelists to a list of
| subscribers/victims.
|
| We stole their term, and they're stealing it back. Seems
| fair.
|
| I don't have an OED subscription, but in the free fact sheet,
| they note "OED's earliest evidence for mailing list is from
| 1898, in Overland Monthly."
|
| https://www.oed.com/dictionary/mailing-list_n?tab=factsheet
| zakki wrote:
| I was using qmail and ezmail mail list management. It was years
| ago an feel easy. I don't know current state though.
| narag wrote:
| I've run one small list, a few hundreds subscribers, a long time
| ago. I used a now defunct service based on free software...
| mailman? I can't remember. One idea: see what popular open source
| projects are using. I wouldn't self-host it, mail is a PITA to
| configure. Much better to use some service.
|
| Technically it's very easy. Some lessons learned:
|
| - Configure it so when someone replies to a message, it's sent by
| default to the list. Some think it's better to reply to the
| person that sent the message you're responding to, but that's
| terrible: a lot of messages get sent privately when that wasn't
| the intention.
|
| - Resist to the temptation of moderation. You'll become a slave.
|
| - No messages accepted except from subscribers.
|
| - If at all possible, avoid automatic subscription. Force people
| to write to _you_ and acknowledge that there 's a person
| maintaining the list and that there are rules. Write down the
| rules, publish them and sent them in a private message to every
| new subscriber.
|
| - Have a web page for the list, bonus points for a private file-
| exchange space.
|
| The worst part is people. Some of them are a piece of work. If a
| few dozens are reunited, you're guarranteed to have some guy that
| doesn't want to be your friend. As soon as you notice someone is
| overly confrontational with you, just drop the conversation with
| a closing "maybe you're right, there are several ways to look at
| it" and limit yourself to a referee role. If the discussion of
| this person with others gets too hot, then have some rule to stop
| it. The silent majority wants a calm conversation, so be
| confident that they will support you.
| yunesj wrote:
| A lot of communities use Discourse (https://discourse.org).
|
| LPSF (https://forum.lpsf.org) migrated to it when Yahoo Groups
| was discontinued.
|
| Some of the advantages are that it's open source, self-hostable,
| and can be configured to work as both a traditional mailing list
| and modern forum.
| hkhanna wrote:
| I've spent a lot of time looking into this for non-profits I am
| involved in. Currently, I use Mailgun's Mailing List feature
| which is pretty good, but has a few warts and doesn't really seem
| to be in active development.
|
| But I have half a mind to develop a Django-based system
| specifically for non-profit member management, build a postgres
| view on top of the Django tables and and have a postfix mail
| server reference that postgres view for mailing list delivery. I
| would use Mailgun or another SMTP relay to minimize
| deliverability issues.
| crotchfire wrote:
| You definitely want to use public-inbox: https://public-
| inbox.org/README.html
|
| It's the same software used by the official Linux Kernel Mailing
| Lists: https://lore.kernel.org/
|
| - It lets people `git clone` the archives and then `git pull`
| from them incrementally, so you get the same "distributed
| backups" that git provides.
|
| - It also provides high-quality (Xapian) fulltext search,
| RSS/Atom, and NNTP access.
|
| - It doesn't artificially fracture mailing list threads at month
| boundaries. I know this sounds like a trivial feature, but I'm
| constantly astonished that most other mailing list archive
| software does this. It's so irritating.
|
| - Most important of all, it provides a smooth migration path away
| from SMTP-push for mailing lists, which has always been the big
| headache. Most of the problems with email go away when you switch
| from push to incremental-pull. Unsurprisingly, git is the perfect
| tool for doing incremental pull.
| epilys wrote:
| I've been writing a new mailing lists manager on and off over the
| years. Deliverability and failure tolerance and recovery scare me
| a lot regarding mailing lists.
|
| My project is by no means ready for production but people
| interested to contribute are always welcome:
|
| https://github.com/meli/mailpot
|
| Dogfooded mailing lists and archives:
|
| https://lists.meli-email.org/
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