[HN Gopher] Why use mailing lists?
___________________________________________________________________
Why use mailing lists?
Author : cnst
Score : 121 points
Date : 2025-09-26 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mailarchive.ietf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mailarchive.ietf.org)
| teddyh wrote:
| Like I recently wrote in response to someone here who was
| fascinated that mailing lists were "still a thing in 2025":
|
| _Please, inform us of an alternative which is:_
|
| _* Non-proprietary_
|
| _* Federated_
|
| _* Archivable_
|
| _* Accessible_
|
| _* Not dependent on a specific company_
|
| -- <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972038>
| mxchris2121 wrote:
| Please inform me of an opensource way to run one that I can
| actually get configured properly.
| teddyh wrote:
| I've heard good things about <https://mailinabox.email>.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Same for self-hosted mail...
| mrweasel wrote:
| I haven't tried it, so it might be more complicated than
| the documentation leads me to believe, but Mox looks
| promising: https://www.xmox.nl/
| yogorenapan wrote:
| I've been using it for a year now. Can vouch for the
| quality and reliability
| eschaton wrote:
| Proxmox has a mail appliance.
| benley wrote:
| Mailman 3 is acceptable, imho. It's been a few years since I
| worked with it, but I was able to design a reliable public
| instance of it (https://mailman.haskell.org) with a few days
| of effort, including the migration from mailman v2.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Same here -- I think I set Mailman 3 up in a day, although
| I was already familiar with setting up the mail (Postfix)
| part.
| layer8 wrote:
| Besides GNU Mailman, there's also Sympa [0]. It's fairly
| straightforward to set those up on a VPS with Debian or
| similar if you're familiar with running a Linux server.
|
| [0] https://www.sympa.community/
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Newsgroups as in NNTP[1] fits those criteria, no?
|
| Granted, federated bit is more tricky now. Back in the days
| many if not most ISPs ran a NNTP server. But the protocol
| supports it.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol
| mrweasel wrote:
| I loved Usenet back in the day, but I sort of wonder why
| organisations keep their servers running. I struggle to find
| any active newsgroups these days. Weirdly enough spam still
| hits some of the groups.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| And conspiracy chain mails still pondering on whether or
| not 9/11 was an inside job. I joined usenet recently to see
| how the things were, and it had some serious ghost town
| vibes.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Yeah it died off sadly. Had so many good news discussions
| back then. Still miss the buzz of downloading a new batch
| of messages.
|
| I used Gmane[1] to access mailing lists as newsgroups,
| which I've always thought was a much better fit.
|
| Alas as with all good things that was shut down also.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Discourse seems to fit the bill (although I'm not 100% sure
| about federation)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| it seems to have a plugin for federation, but I'm not sure
| how federation works for forums
| eschaton wrote:
| It doesn't, federation makes it not a web forum and its
| "web forum first" nature makes Discourse fundamentally
| unsuitable for things like technical work. (As opposed to,
| say, product support.)
|
| If you want federation, set up a mailing list gatewayed to
| a usenet group you host on your own NNTP server, and slap a
| web forum interface on top of that for the whiny children
| who won't use anything that isn't inside a browser.
| o11c wrote:
| Literally _any_ open-source forum or wiki meets all the
| requirements except possibly "federated" (depending on whether
| people set up a dump->restore to another machine), but is
| _much_ more welcoming to ad-hoc contributors who don 't want to
| subscribe to 10,000 emails per day just to get replies to their
| own posts.
|
| If mailing-list users actually used CC properly this would not
| be a problem, but THAT IS NOT THE REALITY WE LIVE IN. Bad
| technical etiquette on behalf of the habitual mailing-list
| users is the main reason people hate mailing lists.
|
| ===
|
| Editing to also reject some of the points from the article:
|
| "1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter
| bullshit. If you accept "must install a mail program", surely
| you can accept "must install lynx or curl"?
|
| The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What
| security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going
| to leak my email address or something?
|
| ... I don't even want to respond in detail to the rest of the
| nonsense that follows. Are they talking about some particular
| forum that hasn't been updated since 1999 or something? Yes
| these are problems which is why people have made solutions to
| them ...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My problem with forums is that I am forced to use a web
| browser and access them through their provided interface. A
| lot of them, especially the older ones, are seriously hard to
| use and even worse on mobile.
|
| Mailing lists I access with my preferred mail client and
| environment.
|
| Receiving "10,000 emails per day" would only happen on a very
| active list. In most cases you're talking about a dozen or at
| worst a few hundred. Your email client can easily filter
| those into a virtual folder, and quickly find the messages
| where you are addressed or threads you're interested in.
|
| Once I have the emails, I have them forever. I am not
| dependent on some forum remaining online five years from now
| if I want to go find an old message.
|
| Web forums and wikis just suck for message-based
| interactions. Email is designed for that and it works really
| well.
| eschaton wrote:
| I find that people who complain about email volume are not
| only unfamiliar with setting up rules to file messages into
| folders, but entirely uninterested in learning how to
| leverage their tools that way.
|
| In fact, it seems many of them resent having to learn
| _anything_ in order to be more productive, instead
| insisting the burden belongs on others. "I don't want to
| get all that email, so it's OK for me to make you visit a
| web page several times a day to participate instead."
|
| And no, Discourse's "mailing list mode" isn't sufficient,
| it's as garbage as the rest of Discourse, especially when D
| showed the right way to do this: Mailing list primary, NNTP
| newsgroup gatewayed (or vice versa), with a web forum for
| those who insist on one.
|
| If only LLVM et al had gone that route.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's replicated work for every person who wants to set up
| filters and notifications. Discord or whatever has
| defaults that don't require everyone to create their
| custom environment.
| LaGrange wrote:
| > Literally any open-source forum or wiki meets all the
| requirements except possibly "federated" (depending on
| whether people set up a dump->restore to another machine),
| but is much more welcoming to ad-hoc contributors who don't
| want to subscribe to 10,000 emails per day just to get
| replies to their own posts.
|
| I know that mailing clients have gotten worse, but not _that_
| worse.
|
| > The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What
| security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they
| going to leak my email address or something?
|
| Most of them employ a whole bunch of google analytics for
| reasons unclear. That should be sufficient.
|
| ---
|
| Though unfortunately I disagree with the OP. Those are
| arguments as to why it would be nice if email stuck around.
| But it won't. Just because the problems come from "bad
| deployments of anti-spam policies" doesn't change the fact
| that the "bad deployments" are literally _the majority of
| email_.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| And those are the exact same reasons I loath the trend of
| discourse moving into discord groups, or slack groups, hell
| I've even seen Facebook groups.
|
| None of those are reachable without an account and in many
| cases an invite (private by default), they are not indexed by
| search engines, they are proprietary, cannot be exported or
| archived, etc.
|
| It's asking for knowledge to be lost.
| throw7 wrote:
| Yes, I was hoping to check out ladybird browser project, but
| they use discord.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| I'm gradually switching our in-person community to Revolt [0]
| because we want to self-host and own the data. (Discord
| offers extreme convenience, but it's a black-box for-profit
| platform.)
|
| We don't want casual discourse to be indexed to the public.
| Instead we'll host a wiki system soon that bubbles up
| technical chatter into worthy articles.
|
| Is that a reasonable compromise?
|
| [0] https://revolt.handmadecities.com
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It's definitely better than discord in that it solves the
| data ownership problem. It's not federated, still
| centralized to your own revolt server - but I think that's
| OK for private groups anyway, or ephemeral discussions
| (unless Revolt can be federated, I'm not familiar with it)
|
| My concern is more the trend of open groups, even open
| source projects, centralizing around discord both for dev
| discussion, community discussion, and technical support.
| There's incredible value to those discussions to be indexed
| and searchable on the web, like the good old days of public
| forums. Actual work took place in public, on mailing lists
| and forums. It could be indexed and scraped, even just
| archived to my local machine.
| skydhash wrote:
| If I see discord, I just go the other way, or use the
| code as is.
| liendolucas wrote:
| I would probably change "Not dependent on a specific company"
| to "Not being hostage from ransomware from specific companies".
|
| See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887
| kragen wrote:
| Even without Slack's ransomware-as-a-service business model,
| being dependent on a specific company is a big problem. If
| Dropbox decides to ban your country for being running too
| many AI crawlers, or DejaNews goes out of business, or XOJane
| decides to pivot to a different market (see http://web.archiv
| e.org/web/20171015000000*/http://www.xojane... for example),
| or LiveJournal gets bought by Russian trolls, it's
| potentially a big problem.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The sad reality is that for 99.99% or the population: WhatsApp
| groups, with a solid 1/5 in your requirement list. (Or at
| least, I hope they get one point, text selection is broken.)
|
| People just not care, they just want to send and recive
| messages and an easy method to add and remove persons.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| ActivityPub? Just because people use it as a Twitter clone
| doesn't mean you can't run mailing list style content on top of
| it. It would be nice to not use Mastodon-isms if you're trying
| to go about doing something like that. However it's easy with
| Mastodon-isms too. Have a bot listen to mentions, use any sort
| of moderation/accept queue to accept questions, then Reblog the
| ones you accept.
|
| ATProto would fit most of the bill too here but AP is self-
| hostable and contained in a way that ATP isn't. AP is also
| standardized and has gone through standards bodies.
| johanyc wrote:
| RSS?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| This is why I run a newsletter.
|
| I love the simplicity of it.
| throwaway270925 wrote:
| I sometimes wonder why there aren't any chat-based apps/UIs for
| mailing lists? Think UIs in the style of
| Discord/Slack/Teams/etc but with email/mailinglist(s) as
| backend.
|
| IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And
| if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
| dfc wrote:
| I think one of the reasons is that mailing list usage
| expects/imposes some level of reflection time and editing
| between sending a new reply. Imagine if every time someone
| hit enter in slack/teams/discord a new email showed up in a
| thread somewhere in someone's mail reader.
| rakoo wrote:
| Deltachat is still alive and well, you can see it evolve on
| their blog: https://delta.chat/en/blog
|
| The thing is, deltachat really focuses on encrypted-first,
| and if possible encrypted-only communications in tight-knit
| groups: servers have no authority, they're merely relays.
| Mailing lists are not built for that, they're the central
| authority point where all moderation happens, and being
| forwarders they can't work with e2ee. In the current setting
| deltachat isn't built for mailing lists but group or 1-1
| communication work very well.
| cnst wrote:
| Via http://www.mail-archive.com/nginx@nginx.org/msg25495.html.
|
| Sadly, it's been announced yesterday that the nginx.org mailing
| lists are being shutdown by end of month (Sept 2025).
|
| P.S. Probably one more reason to look into into the freenginx
| fork of nginx -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373327 --
| their mailing lists are at http://freenginx.org/en/support.html.
| vrnvu wrote:
| Mailing list yes, RSS yes....
|
| Old, boring, simple, works.
|
| No ads.
| a-dub wrote:
| how hard is it to run your own smtp gateway in 2025? are you good
| if you just set up dkim and such?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You also need a server with a good IP address reputation
| located in a non-sketchy country and a domain that isn't brand-
| new. And probably more.
| cnst wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the reputation thing is overstated, else, how
| would all those providers be able to scale up their SMTP
| services themselves?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Gmail or Apple scaling up is going to be treated
| differently from some random new domain suddenly appearing
| on a Digital Ocean or Hetzner or AWS cloud instance.
| cnst wrote:
| But how would anyone know it's Gmail or Apple if the IP
| address is new?
|
| That's exactly my point, that the reputation need is
| overstated by all those services that claim to solve a
| known problem that everyone has heard of, but noone has
| actually experienced, because, guess what, it might not
| actually exist.
|
| I've seen plenty of cases where the emails sent out
| through Sendgrid et al, end up in the Spam folder, or
| these "professional" services don't even attempt to
| retry, thus, never getting through the greylisting, or
| other bugs which cause deliverability issues, which would
| never happen if you were to run your own real mail-server
| on your own hardware yourself.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Sendgrid, Mailchimp, et. al. ends up in the spam folder
| because most of what they send is spam.
| cnst wrote:
| I'm not disputing that assertion, yet it does go against
| the marketing materials we're all presented by all of
| these services, as for reasons to not run our own
| mailservers.
|
| In other words, if all you want to do is run a personal
| mailserver, or even a corporate one, you'll probably not
| have to deal with this supposed IP reputation issue,
| unless the IP addresses you use, have already been added
| to the blacklists even before you start at it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes if you are using a domain that's been around for a
| while and has a reasonably stable IP address history and
| is not on any blacklists, that is the defintion of a
| "good" reputation. Or at least it's not a bad one.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| it's very easy to get blackholed by major providers like
| gmail though, and very difficult to get out
| eikenberry wrote:
| You can also host your own MX servers but use a provider for
| SMTP. Almost any mail provider that supports custom domains
| will work at their lowest price point.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Hard. You need reverse DNS, which means you need to have a
| machine with a stable ip, and convince the network operator to
| set up a PTR reverse DNS record for you. This part is fairly
| easy if you are renting a VPS with a fixed ipv4 address, just
| ask the rental company.
|
| You also need to set up mx, dkim, dmarc, spf, and a bunch of
| other stupid DNS records related to dane/tlsa/mta-sts that aim
| to put bandaids on top of bandaids on top of what is the shitty
| unsecured and unencrypted email protocol.
|
| Then you need to fight with a bunch of arcane 90s Unix programs
| to actually not be gaping security holes that will allow people
| to relay off of your MTA and get you blacklisted worldwide. You
| need to fight with a milter and acme client to finally get the
| TLS stuff right too. Then there's the need to set up a spam
| filter for your inbox (probably).
| teeray wrote:
| I set one up for our HOA as a unified conversation and
| notification platform. Everyone now has exactly one email address
| to remember to notify everyone of, say, a graduation party where
| there might be some extra cars. Nobody needs Facebook, or a
| Google account for Groups, etc. When people move, their addresses
| just get updated in the list.
|
| The only trouble I had moderating it is people just love
| searching for whatever email was sent last to the list, necroing
| the thread and changing topics to whatever is on their mind. I
| had to set threads to auto-lock after a week or two of inactivity
| to force people to start new topics for things that are, well,
| new topics.
| pron wrote:
| Also: notification and sorting are highly configurable through
| rules.
| amo1111 wrote:
| As someone who has grown up in the era of forums. I have a new
| found appreciation for mailing lists. I did recently come across
| some interesting mailing list archives from the 80s
| https://github.com/MITDDC/cpmarchive-1979-1984/blob/main/cpm...
| self_awareness wrote:
| Is format=flowed too bleeding edge for those people?
| perching_aix wrote:
| It'd be a bit too readable without the hard wraps at 80 chars.
| They just gotta spice up that _plain_ text ever so little.
| velcrovan wrote:
| If I want reams of spam educating me on how to spell "pedophile"
| in Italian, I will join a mailing list.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Protocols not platforms. Email is something anyone can use
| without a megacorp giving permission!
| landgenoot wrote:
| Think twice
| eikenberry wrote:
| How so? Just because many people use mega-corp for email
| doesn't mean you need to. There are tons of alternative,
| small company providers or you can host your own. None of
| these require big-corp's support.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Because according to popular judgement, independent email
| hosting in the modern day is a very difficult ordeal.
|
| Is that true? Is that false? How would one tell? One's own
| experience will be trivially handwaved away as an anecdote,
| people's experiences will be handwaved away as hearsay, and
| a claim of general consensus will be handwaved away by
| other claims that the person pointing it out is just living
| in a bubble. Principled thinking? Could be false, could be
| true, really - both would make sense. Doesn't sound very
| productive to discuss to me.
|
| If nothing else, surely you can agree that despite what
| _might be_ , what _is_ is that email is incredibly
| centralized, right?
| tolerance wrote:
| I was over reading that (very well-written) explanation of the AT
| Protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388021
|
| And I felt conflicted. Because it sounds great. It makes sense.
| But I don't want it and now I'm wondering about what's appealing
| about distributing bits of content across platforms.
|
| This is something I can get behind. Fenced gardens.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Despite that, they're still heavily used
|
| This person is in a serious bubble. Mailing lists are not used by
| billions of people.
|
| >Mailing lists require no special software
|
| Even ignoring that most social media are accessible via a web
| browser instead of their dedicated app, this is just adding more
| complexity than having a single app for people to use. Everyday
| people want a single way to do things.
|
| >Mailing lists are simple
|
| No, you have to figure out how to configure a mail client and how
| to properly respond to things and is no where as user friendly as
| typical social media apps.
|
| >They impose minimal security risk
|
| Using an external service lets you outsource security to
| dedicated security teams as opposed to no security team or a
| volunteer security guy.
|
| >They impose minimal privacy risk.
|
| I trust the privacy of social media than some mailing list where
| the admin could secretly grep the contents of it with no over
| site.
|
| >Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly
|
| The average internet user is scrolling through tiktok, streaming
| videos. Bandwidth is not a big deal anymore.
|
| >Mailing lists interoperate.
|
| Social media have features for reposting between different
| groups. There is also copy and paste and links.
|
| >They're asynchronous
|
| There are social media like facebook which are also asynchronous.
|
| >They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple
| outages and severe congestion
|
| Social media is also resistant to outages and have dedicated
| teams towards keeping it online.
|
| >They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.
|
| Have you not been on social media for decades? Pushing content to
| the user is the norm.
|
| >They scale beautifully.
|
| Social media scales to billions of people using them.
|
| >they're relatively free of abuse vectors.
|
| You can't pretend that spam does not exist.
|
| Mailing lists are not mainstream and they never will be. That way
| of operating did not resonate with people at the scale that is
| needed to reach even tens of millions of people. Social media
| works. Chat apps work. Forums can work.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| I hate mailing lists, even if I recognize some of their benefits.
| A forum like Discourse is infinitely better in usability - to
| view, browse, search, follow specific threads or forums and mute
| the rest, do DMs, do real nested replies, embed rich media and
| code with proper formatting and just have a nice interface to
| work with. It looks like they even support ActivityPub federation
| recently. Although its GPL not MIT. I'm sure someone will come
| and tell me how all of this is doable with some janky interface
| or hacks on mailing lists. It's just unfortunate we have to
| choose. The people on mailing lists often argue vigorously for
| them, the rest of us are on discord/slack and have no idea they
| even exist and are repulsed by the usability problems. You can't
| convince me pasting diffs in an email thread is on par with
| Github/Gitlab code reviews with no downsides whatsoever.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I hate the look of Discourse, it looks like the worst case of a
| phone app and ""modern"" web design
|
| I think it's primarily due to absence of margins on the sides
| and thin borders
| imiric wrote:
| The value of the federated/decentralized nature of email is hard
| to overstate.
|
| So many of the problems of modern technology are caused by
| centralization. It concentrates power and wealth into a handful
| of companies that now control the internet. It introduces
| extraordinary problems from managing data and services at global
| scales, which is the biggest technical challenge these companies
| face. It makes government surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and
| is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc.
| It robs people of control over their data.
|
| All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an
| issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago.
| It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the
| internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with
| the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.
|
| I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've
| written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it
| here.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296810
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44327508
| perching_aix wrote:
| > federated/decentralized
|
| I'd be really quite hesitant to blur these concepts so
| casually.
| eisa01 wrote:
| Mailing lists are horrible for people new to a list, as you have
| no history to search in your inbox and the UI to browse the
| archives are beyond atrocious.
|
| People that have been on the list for decades tend to forget
| this, and wonder why it dies down
| shutton wrote:
| I've been running Gaggle Mail (https://gaggle.email) for over 10
| years, and mailing lists are still very popular in certain
| circles. They're especially valued for long-form discussions --
| legal groups, professional associations, HOAs, and similar
| communities still rely on them because they're simple, reliable,
| and easy to archive.
| kajaktum wrote:
| All this is true but mailing lists UI sucks. Please tell me how
| you navigate a tree of messages? It is not easy to tell who is
| this responding to and who responds to it. Yes, it can be figured
| out but why does the tree change as I navigate it? [0]
|
| [0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/7/103
| perching_aix wrote:
| To be honest, I had a lot more trouble _finding the tree_ there
| than understanding what it shows per se.
| mcdow wrote:
| I bet it wouldn't be too hard to build a nice UI over a mailing
| list. You could make it as nice as Slack. Has this been done?
| melodyogonna wrote:
| I still don't know how to get started with mailing lists. Is
| there some server you have to join?
| philip1209 wrote:
| I was trying to make a modern version of mailing lists with
| Booklet [1] - it just never got traction. I intend to open-source
| it soon. [2]
|
| Async communications are underrated.
|
| [1]: https://booklet.group
|
| [2]: I did open-source my other project recently, though - so
| it's not an entirely hollow intention!
| perching_aix wrote:
| The only thing keeping me away from mailing lists is them being
| built on top of email.
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(page generated 2025-09-26 23:00 UTC)