[HN Gopher] Why use mailing lists?
___________________________________________________________________
Why use mailing lists?
Author : cnst
Score : 233 points
Date : 2025-09-26 19:27 UTC (1 days 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.
| immibis wrote:
| I use Postfix and Dovecot. Configuration was annoying, but
| doable. If you read mail on the server itself then you
| don't need Dovecot.
| 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.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Mailman 3 is horrible, which is why some folks have ported
| Mailman 2 to Python3.
|
| https://github.com/jaredmauch/mailman2-python3
| 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
| clircle wrote:
| News.gmane.io is up. I use it daily to track a few
| projects.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Ah, thanks. I knew there were issues, but somehow missed
| they'd resolved it.
|
| A great service, glad to see it alive and kicking!
| pasc1878 wrote:
| They have not resolved the big issue.
|
| news.gmane.io has always worked.
|
| The issue is that the owner of that domain made a mistake
| and gave the control of the web frontend to someone else
| who just shut it down.
| e12e wrote:
| The D programming language forum is using nntp:
|
| https://forum.dlang.org/help#about
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| why is it bad for technical work? it seems like a very
| technical variety of forum
| eschaton wrote:
| It has all sorts of gamification that gets in the way,
| it's easy to over-silo discussions, it has a concept of
| "answered" that's not really appropriate for a lot of
| project level discussion, it has all sorts of other
| extraneous crap like "reactions," and--most importantly--
| it's fundamentally implemented as a web page that
| everyone involved needs visit regularly to see when
| there's something new and to respond to that.
|
| Discourse would be fine if it were a front end to a
| mailing list and didn't have the excess categorization
| and gamification crap. Instead it's a web forum with a
| mailing list mode tacked on by people who never did
| substantial technical work using mailing lists.
| 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| But you trade a lot for not wanting to set up your own
| custom environment. You only have to set up yours. There
| is no one size that fits all, and if this flexibility
| comes with these features mentioned (non-proprietary,
| federated, archivable, accessible, not dependent on a
| specific company), then: yes, please! How could anyone
| not want this?
| eschaton wrote:
| "It sucks for everyone equally, so it's better."
|
| Nah. The "replicated work" is in deciding what you want
| your mail folder structure to look like, which is a
| pretty personal decision; creating the filter on List-Id
| itself is trivial.
| 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_.
| jjav wrote:
| > "1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter
| bullshit.
|
| Proprietary mediums require and are limited to specific
| software with limitied functionality, whether in the form or
| a specific application, or a web interface that only works
| one way and is missing most functionality.
|
| With email I run whatever email client I like best and can
| filter, sort, thread, etc just the way I want.
| 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.
| 62 wrote:
| > It's asking for knowledge to be lost.
|
| You say that like it's not already happening. It's happening.
| Many technical chats are only happening on discord now.
| Everything single day the volume of current technical
| knowledge gets smaller.
| throw7 wrote:
| Yes, I was hoping to check out ladybird browser project, but
| they use discord.
| pwdisswordfishz wrote:
| There are other problems besides access. The big one being
| that the people that you'll find on Discord are the kinds
| of people that you'll find on 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The distinction between chat and email and forums was
| helpful mentally to compartmentalize - you'd expect people
| to act differently (forums even have things they call
| "chat" threads that are more like chat).
|
| The problem the "bubble up to Wiki" is that you need a
| specific subset of people with the technical know-how to
| understand the issue and solutions AND the time and desire
| to update the Wiki.
|
| One thing that can help is being absolutely a tyrant and
| insisting that discussions about bugs, etc happen on a bug
| tracker- or at least the resolutions go there.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Good advice, appreciate it!
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Mailing lists are largely a different mode of communication
| than chat, as alluded to in parts of TFA. I'd go as far as to
| say that mailing lists are mostly incompatible with chat-like
| usage patterns. It's a feature, not a bug. Chat programs and
| protocols like IRC have existed almost as long as mailing
| lists, but were never a replacement for them.
| dfabulich wrote:
| Mailing lists aren't federated. Everyone has to email one
| particular address at one particular domain; whoever controls
| that email address + domain can censor/block emails. (That's a
| good thing when you're blocking spam!)
|
| If you're OK with the fact that mailing lists are somewhat
| centralized, there are actually got a ton of great alternatives
| to pure mailing lists.
|
| All popular open-source web forums support email notifications,
| and most of them support posting by email, (I know phpBB and
| Discourse do,) and all of them have sitemaps with crawlable
| archives.
| dminuoso wrote:
| You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The
| network of mail is very much federated.
|
| In mail we have so many freedoms. We have become so locked
| into technology that we have to introduce a term like
| "federation" to signify the interoperability and freedom of a
| single component. Mail is federation layered upon federation.
|
| The fact that you can just use a mailings list address as a
| member of another mailing list gives you even more federation
| possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange
| protocols.
| Erwyn wrote:
| > You can run your own mail server and name server on top.
| The network of mail is very much federated.
|
| While I do completely agree with that in theory (and I also
| love mail) I think it does not stand the reality test
| because of email deliveravility which tends to be a
| nightmare.
|
| How do you solve this? Do you use a third party SMTP?
| Intermernet wrote:
| I ran multiple mail servers for years until about 10
| years ago (moved out of the industry). The deliverability
| problem, as far as I know, hasn't really changed that
| much in the last decade. The key was to configure DKIM,
| SPF, only use secure protocols and monitor the various
| black/block-lists to make sure you aren't on them for
| very long. In my experience, if you end up on a few bad
| lists, and don't react quickly, the reputation of your
| domain goes down rapidly and it's harder to get off said
| lists.
|
| You also want some spam filtering, which, these days, is
| apparently much more powerful with local LLMs. I used to
| just use various bayesian classification tools, but I've
| heard that the current state of affairs is better. Having
| said that, when you've trained the tool, it does a pretty
| good job.
|
| It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once
| you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to
| almost zero.
| Erwyn wrote:
| > It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once
| you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to
| almost zero.
|
| This is where I disagree. In my opinion it might not be
| that hard but the maintenance is really not zero as you
| just described how you need a reputable IP as a
| prerequisite and constant monitoring of block lists.
|
| Just having DKIM, SPF and DMARC really was not enough
| last time I checked for getting delivered to let's say
| outlook.
| Intermernet wrote:
| The monitoring of block lists is much more important than
| people assume. I haven't looked into it in detail, but it
| always seemed like the reputation was based on a ratio of
| number of messages to known bad messages. If you have a
| moderately busy server, and you manage to keep off the
| block lists (or at least pro-actively remove yourself
| from them) then the reputaion gets higher and higher, and
| the maintenance goes down.
|
| If you're a domain that only receives occasional
| messages, and you end up on Spamhaus and co, you're gonna
| have a problem. It seems that reputation at small scale
| is viral. You need actively good reputation and response
| time. But, honestly, it seemed that it didn't take more
| than about 3 months per domain I administered until they
| were just accepted by the net as valid, good actors.
| Intermernet wrote:
| I just realised, and this could be red herring, that
| almost all of the domains I've administered were based in
| Australia. I suppose it's possible that the IP ranges I'm
| dealing with have a better reputation than those from
| other countries. I have administered a few domains from
| US companies and IPs, but they've often been based in
| known data centres which may help their cause. I can't
| really talk to the reliability of hosting a mail server
| on a consumer / small business IP in the US / Europe/
| Asia. It's possible that all known, common IPs in these
| areas have a natural disadvantage when it comes to
| reputation. I suppose try running a tunnel from your
| server to a small VPS in a knwon data centre? Not ideal,
| but it may help.
|
| It would be annoying if entire US/European/Asian ISP IP
| ranges were immediately blocked. We should have moved on
| from that for many reasons unrelated to email.
| immibis wrote:
| If you consistently don't receive mail you expect, then
| you stop giving money to your mail host and get a
| different one.
| Erwyn wrote:
| It's not about receiving. Receiving is the easy part. It
| is about the delivery of your own mail.
|
| > you stop giving money to your mail host and get a
| different one.
|
| I was entertaining the "host your own mail server"
| thought, I agree that if you don't host it yourself then
| you can change your provider if it fails you.
| palata wrote:
| > if you don't host it yourself then you can change your
| provider if it fails you.
|
| Even if you host it yourself :-). The key is to own your
| domain.
| Erwyn wrote:
| If I recall the domain is not the only issue, IP is also
| deeply involved or am I wrong?
| immibis wrote:
| IP address is involved in some receiver's reputation
| calculation. It's never involved when sending _to_ a
| domain.
| immibis wrote:
| Who needs the transmission more - the sender, or the
| recipient?
|
| Much of the time, when it's for signup verification,
| especially for a free service, they just write "don't use
| @live.microsoft.com" underneath the email address box.
| The user wants to be signed up for the service more than
| the service provider wants a new user, at least by enough
| to use an alternate email address. Enough cases like
| this, and the user quits @live.microsoft.com.
| palata wrote:
| The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth.
| Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not
| necessary.
|
| And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail.
| It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a
| ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail
| account by Google.
| Erwyn wrote:
| > The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth.
| Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not
| necessary.
|
| I agree to some extent. But it is more involved than
| deploying a Discourse instance in my opinion.
|
| > And then there are many mail providers other than
| Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact
| that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a
| Gmail account by Google.
|
| 100% agree. This is the tradeoff I went for. I would love
| for it to be easier to self host but you can definitely
| use another provider.
| s1110 wrote:
| IRC
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Yesterday I seen someone claiming on Reddit that they stopped
| using mailing list in favour of using rss
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Yes that works to read them - and I do use that.
|
| But if you want to write a message in reply or start a new
| conversation - RSS does not allow that. (In the cases that I
| use RSS - I will just copy to my mail app - it is more
| cumbersome than just replying in mail (or usenet via gmane)
| but this is not something I do often for those lists.
| maxloh wrote:
| Maybe Matrix?
| rlpb wrote:
| I think Matrix is a good upcoming contender. The available
| clients are not really mature yet though. Element is
| excessively heavyweight and bloated, being Electron based.
| Other clients all seem to miss some essential feature or
| other. And there's no good archiving solution yet.
| Arathorn wrote:
| Matrix has/had a great archiver at
| https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-viewer - but it fell
| foul of the bizarre failure mode that folks who had
| explicitly set their rooms to be archivable had
| subsequently forgotten that they had, and then went
| absolutely berserk when they discovered their rooms having
| been archived: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-
| happened-with-the-archi.... This was one of the reasons
| given for libera to turn off the libera<->matrix irc
| bridge.
|
| At the time we had much bigger problems to deal with, so we
| shelved it and have yet to get back to it.
| RossBencina wrote:
| Even within the realm of mailing lists I'm not sure it's as
| easy as it used to be to find reliable hosting.
| imcritic wrote:
| First inform us of mail providers that match the same criteria.
| randunel wrote:
| All, as far as I can tell.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Forums are fine.
|
| You understand I'm sure that federated is not the same as
| decentralized. Mailing lists are moderated, the list is hosted
| on a specific domain and that domain's owner can do whatever
| they want with the list. How is that different from a forum or
| some website? I don't like them but there mastodon,matrix,etc..
| all open source and you can host them on a domain like you can
| a mailing list. They meet all your criteria.
|
| I have an additional criteria to add: Security! I would like to
| authenticate that someone really said what is on the mailing
| list or its archives.
|
| But before that, mailing lists are not as accessible as all the
| other options, because it all comes down to how accessible the
| email client is. Gmail is wildly different from mutt.
| Inconsistently accessible is what it is.
|
| how about privacy? I wouldn't want my email and my email's
| domain published to the world to communicate with the list. And
| again with integrity, mailing list moderators can do all sorts
| of stuff (and I've seen plenty of shady and downright
| questionable practices).
|
| How about we let things built for different times and with
| different requirements than what we have to day go to sleep
| quietly?
| whartung wrote:
| Mailing list delivery is centralized, but archiving is
| federated. How many folks have a full copy of, say, the last
| 1, 2, 5, 10 years of a long running mailing list?
|
| Client accessibility is up to the individual user. They can
| choose whatever client fits them best.
|
| I don't know any mailing list software that signs messages as
| a sort of "yes, this message did travel through the mailing
| list" verification. Were it that important I'm sure it's
| possible. But having identical messages on 1000 subscribers
| computers has to stand for something.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| If the mailing list server tampered with the message,
| everyone will get the false message. But if it is an
| encrypted group chat on matrix for example, you can 100%
| verify that the person posted that message (provided you've
| verified them, but even if you haven't, your logic of other
| people having verified it can be used).
|
| As for archiving, you can archive mastodon, lemmy, bluesky,
| matrix,etc... as you said, if it was important, it can be
| made so for any open platform. Public archiving services
| will use APIs instead of mail clients, that's the only
| difference which shouldn't make a difference to users.
|
| Even on the closed source platform twitter, there are
| public archives of things. Governments post official
| communication and records on there. Some governments are
| experimenting with Git for law publications. Nepal just
| voted an interim leader over discord!
|
| This nostalgic thinking about mailing lists is incompatible
| with a technologist's mindset.
| jjav wrote:
| This mostly falls under "Accessible", but want to highlight how
| incredibly limited the UI is in every proprietary messaging
| platform. One is forced to interact with it in just one way and
| it's inevitably missing tons of functionality.
|
| With email, there can be no limits because it is an open
| standard.
|
| One can pick whichever MUA (email client) one prefers or
| trivially switch betwen multiple ones without any loss of data.
|
| But even more importantly, if one has custom needs or
| preferences, that is also easy. All my incoming email goes
| first through procmail where I can apply various filters and
| labels and can sort it into different folders and priorities on
| completely custom criteria that fits what I want.
| 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.
| jesprenj wrote:
| Also see https://en.angie.software
| 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.
| Bender wrote:
| Running your own mail servers to do the volume emitted by
| Sendgrid would indeed be on the level of starting your
| own medium sized business. Getting IP allocation,
| swip'ing them out to divisions of your company or your
| customers and paying into whitelists for all the "free"
| email providers like Google et al would be a massive up
| front cost.
|
| Running your own mail server for personal email is an
| afternoon of setup _DKIM, DMARC, SPF, FCrDNS and such_ ,
| setup of your MTA/IMAP/WEB preferences, tuning some
| filters, setting up aliases, accounts for family and with
| time the tuning work eventually slows down and then it's
| just maintaining accounts, aliases and the occasional
| rules to block problem networks and domains. With time
| you may find some servers that require lowering security
| or filters but that is also very easy.
| layer8 wrote:
| There are a lot of small email hosting providers that
| don't seem to have much trouble.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| it's very easy to get blackholed by major providers like
| gmail though, and very difficult to get out
| msm_ wrote:
| From experience, it's not overstated. Running your own
| email server is pain, and even if you do everything right
| you may get delivery problems. And if you want to improve
| your chances, you have to do whatever big tech wants you
| to. And if you ever get onto the bad side (for example,
| your site is hacked and distributes malware for a few days)
| you may never recover.
|
| It's not impossible, but it's not something you run once
| and forget.
| 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).
| floren wrote:
| > 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
|
| how many decades has it been since this was actually the
| default config?
| avar wrote:
| This may not be what you're asking, but it's rather trivial if
| you're setting up an SMTP gateway that proxies traffic to
| another SMTP that handles the IP address reputation management
| etc.
|
| E.g. I do that with Exim on my Debian laptop and have it relay
| outgoing messages to Gmail's SMTP. It's great if what you want
| out of it is being able to send E-Mail while "offline", the
| messages will get locally queued until you've got an outgoing
| connection, much better than relying on individual MUA's to
| handle that, and it'll work with one-off invocations like
| piping to mail(1) etc.
| pepa65 wrote:
| Running an smtp server to receive mail is supereasy as long as
| you have inbound port 25.
|
| Or you can run a submission service that requires submitters to
| login, usually on port 587/465.
|
| If you want to send from your server, that is way more
| difficult, requiring all kinds of safeguards, SPF, DKIM, ARC,
| reputation, etc. They keep making it more complicated, because
| that's the source of spam.
|
| Or you can just submit mails to a relay, that will send mails
| for you, this can even be Google or some other MX service. This
| then always requires you to authenticate with your account.
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Fun fact: if you change the subject to a reply in Outlook (the
| desktop client; not sure about 365) it will automatically start
| a new thread. This feature was added because MS found that the
| "reply to last e-mail from intended recipients" was a common
| way for people to compose new e-mails.
| teddyh wrote:
| Interesting. You could do the same thing automatically on the
| mailing list server side, right?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Almost like the UX of mailing lists isn't actually that good...
| STRiDEX wrote:
| Our HoA uses google groups. Mild spam, but overall pretty good
| for threads. Too many people spam everyone asking for a plumber
| or whatever
| 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.
| 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?
| eikenberry wrote:
| It is centralized (I wouldn't say "incredibly", but
| sufficiently) but because it is an open standard it
| doesn't matter. You can switch providers very easily with
| many options.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The federated nature of e-mail is degrading. Most recent
| example: My kid just registered with CCCApply (the central
| website for California Community and City colleges).
|
| It took a while. Finally after calling support I found out that
| the e-mail you get your confirmation code to doesn't work with
| most e-mail providers (they said custom e-mail domains hardly
| ever work, Yahoo e-mails never work, Outlook is iffy) so please
| register with a gmail address (and they offered to help me sign
| up for gmail if I didn't have it).
|
| An older example: According to a Macy's CS rep, Macy's won't
| deliver their e-mails to domains registered with godaddy (the
| actual e-mail provider apparently doesn't matter, but in this
| case it was Microsoft). My mom has an account with them that
| she can't access, because she needs to receive an e-mail to
| login, and she needs to login to change which e-mail address is
| associated with it.
| 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.
| xigoi wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This will only allow them to find the text of the messages,
| which is public anyway, so what exactly are you worried about?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Not all mailing lists are public.
| 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
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| the UI/UX of discord is definitely nice, but the /ethics/ of
| discord isn't.
| dewey wrote:
| Discourse not Discord
| pabs3 wrote:
| I hate Discourse because I can't read it with a local email
| client.
| AAAAaccountAAAA wrote:
| At least at some point of time it was possible to order
| Discourse discussions as emails, which you can reply to, and
| it worked pretty much like a mailing list. Don't know how it
| is currently, though.
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm not blurring them. Email is both.
|
| Besides, this distinction has been discussed ad nauseam, and
| is not interesting. Especially since when contrasted with
| centralization, which was my main point, both concepts avoid
| its issues.
| 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
| skydhash wrote:
| Wait, what? I regularly use marc-info (for OpenBSD) and emacs-
| devel, and it's quite easy to find information. And you can
| always get the mbox and use something like mairix if you want
| local tools.
| layer8 wrote:
| Usually an email archive of the list is available for download,
| which you can incorporate into your local archive. In case none
| is available, what I have sometimes done is to ask a resident
| member (privately) if they can send me their archive.
| eisa01 wrote:
| The mailing lists relevant for me do not have that.
|
| Good that you can get the archive, it still has a quite high
| setup cost for people not used to mailing lists compared to
| visiting a Discourse forum
| 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.
| mixcocam wrote:
| Are you the owner? Any way to DM?
| 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?
| arp242 wrote:
| Spent some time on this a few years back and have a half-
| finished project for it. The thing that proved to be a huge
| roadblock was importing existing archives since many don't
| provide a good interface to it.
|
| The https://lore.kernel.org site is actually fairly decent,
| but limited to Linux kernel stuff and some adjacent projects.
| Gmane was quite nice too, but now defunct (the web UI
| anyway).
| lmm wrote:
| It hasn't been done, because it's impossible. You might get
| the first 80%, maybe even the first 90% if you had enough
| money to hire top designers for several years, but you'll
| never reach Slack level polish.
| layer8 wrote:
| This is all a matter of the email client. Useful email clients
| show email threads in trees like this (the red lines and
| arrows): https://vigasdeep.com/2012/06/07/mutt-the-ultimate-
| mailing-c...
| arp242 wrote:
| What if you're not subscribed? I don't usually care about the
| day to day of Linux kernel dev, but that one thread might be
| of interest to me. Actually, I might have something to
| contribute, but since I'm not subscribed the UX on that sucks
| too.
|
| "Just use mutt" as a reply to "I want to read this one email
| thread" is rather missing the point. Plus the reality is most
| people neither use nor want mutt. Many people think the UX on
| mutt is horrible. Nice if it works for you, but it doesn't
| for many. So there's that.
| pabs3 wrote:
| There are tools to import mails into whichever email client
| you prefer, especially if the list is archived on a public-
| inbox instance, which is the best mailing list archiving
| system so far.
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/875239/
| https://blog.gnoack.org/post/lei/
| https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/lore-lei-
| part-1-getti... https://b4.docs.kernel.org/
| https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl
| arp242 wrote:
| You can't seriously claim that this is good UX. And
| that's what this is about: not that it's impossible but
| that the UX is not good, especially for the casual user
| only interested in the occasional thread.
| skydhash wrote:
| The web interface for the archive is for casual users and
| I believe most have clickable link for the subject that
| lists the email in a thread and a "previous/next in
| thread" button.
|
| If you're downloading mbox files, then you know how to
| handle them.
| pabs3 wrote:
| It depends on your client, if you have one with bad UX,
| then get a better one.
| melodyogonna wrote:
| I still don't know how to get started with mailing lists. Is
| there some server you have to join?
| layer8 wrote:
| You can set up an email list using Google Groups, for instance.
| As an example for such a list, see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767555.
|
| People need to subscribe to the mailing list, either by sending
| a subscribe email to the appropriate email address, or via a
| web interface that is specific to the mailing list server. Once
| subscribed, you simply send emails to the list's email address,
| and receive emails from that address. It's useful to set up a
| filter in your email account or email client so that all
| messages from a given mailing list are automatically sorted
| into a separate email folder.
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| You need a good email client (and email editor) that provides
| some affordances for mailing lists, for sure. Apart from that,
| the fact that mailing lists use email provides at least half of
| their benefits, and of the reasons they endure.
| tonymet wrote:
| I digitized HOA records and initially considered using a
| collaboration tool like Slack partnered with Google Drive to
| create an online community.
|
| Although a corporation and their hierarchy can impose tools
| easily, HOA communities don't have that luxury. You have broad
| demographics, skills and no time to support any of them.
|
| A bigger issue is credentialing. You don't want the business of
| helping seniors log into or reset their Slack password.
|
| My ultimate "non-engineering" solution was to use email for
| everything. A mailing list for communications. Records requests
| are handled via email with some automation.
|
| There's tremendous opportunity for more email Saas -- like
| Sourcehut but for other disciplines.
|
| Everyone and everything can do email. It's easy to automate, and
| authentication is someone else's problem (the recipient only
| needs access to their inbox).
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I loved and love mailing lists, except for their capacity for
| ensuring everyone's email addresses are out there in the open for
| everyone else, including the scammers and spammers. I still use
| them (very few! and almost none of them are "tech ones"). I have
| a dedicated email address for them, which is disposable but
| doesn't look the part. I do wish, though, that many more groups
| would adopt mailing lists.
|
| I had started a small cinema/lit club/group and got some good
| traction as well. But everyone wanted to bring in the latest
| group chat toys, online meet toys. I had proposed (the async)
| mailing list (private; I had hoped I'd find one), and it was shot
| down immediately, IIRC, by everyone else.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Can anyone recommend mailing list hosting for a non-public group
| of about 20-30 people that costs less than $100 per year?
|
| My family plans all of their reunions via e-mail and every year
| we end up with _someone_ putting an out-of-date e-mail for
| someone in the list, or forgetting to include someone, or
| including someone who has asked to not get updates. I offered to
| host a mailing server, and I may just end up rolling my own on a
| DO droplet with mailgun or something for reliable delivery
| because mailing list hosting I could find was rather expensive.
| shutton wrote:
| Gaggle Mail (https://gaggle.email) has a free plan and it's
| cheapest paid plan is $100 per year. It's popular with family
| groups doing what you describe.
| nanolith wrote:
| I have actually argued for the use of mailing lists for corporate
| engineering discussions. When that becomes the medium for code
| review or design discussions, there's a nice streamlined
| workflow. Further, it's practically trivial to write or customize
| a mailing list reflector. If you have a decent and secure mail
| client library, you're a weekend away from it just working.
| Contrast that with customizing or rolling your own IRC, Slack,
| Discord, or web forum clone. Mailing lists don't suffer from
| vendor lock-in, and anyone with a mail client and who can follow
| basic rules can participate.
|
| An invitation-only mailing list with a reflector that verifies
| PGP encryption and non-repudiation is just fine for most
| corporate discussions. For mailing lists open to the public, new
| users can be placed in a moderation queue for a period of time
| until it's clear that they understand list netiquette and
| formatting rules.
| eschaton wrote:
| I think for internal corporate use, NNTP would work even
| better, _if_ it were still supported in mail clients. I
| deployed it for exactly that purpose in the late 1990s and it
| was great.
|
| Fortunately there are IMAP shared mailboxes, which we worked
| incredibly hard at CMU during the Cyrus project to ensure would
| work just as well as bboards did in CMU's previous Andrew Mail
| System. ("Bulletin boards," aka bboards, were basically CMU-
| local Usenet, with global Usenet under a netnews.* hierarchy
| via a gateway.)
|
| Most IMAP clients worth their salt support shared mailbox
| hierarchies, even Apple Mail does, so it's "just" a matter of
| setting up shared groups on a server.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I agree that NNTP would be better. I do have a NNTP server
| because of this, although my intention is that it can be used
| for public discussions and not only for internal corporate
| use, although I did implement authentication in case some
| newsgroups are used for private discussions too.
|
| (Note, the article in the IETF mailing list does mention
| Usenet too)
| alberth wrote:
| The irony of talking about loving mailing list ... while we're
| all using a centralized, proprietary web forum (HN) to talk about
| it.
| nickm12 wrote:
| Agree these are advantages: Mailing lists are simple - Mailing
| lists are bandwidth-friendly - Mailing lists interoperate -
| They're asynchronous - They're portable - They can be freely
| interconverted - They can be written to media and read from it
|
| Disagree these are advantages: Mailing lists require no special
| software - They impose minimal security risk - They impose
| minimal privacy risk - They're push, not pull, so new content
| just shows up - They scale beautifully - they're relatively free
| of abuse vectors - They handle threading well
|
| I still use mailing lists, both at work and personally, but they
| are 1970s technology and it feels like it. We could build mailing
| lists for this century that keep these advantages and fix what's
| broken, but there's no business model in it.
| 7bit wrote:
| Minimal privacy risk is such a BS "advantage". You put your
| email out there for everybody to read it. So privacy with
| mailing lists does not exist
|
| If I want to remain anonymous, I need to register another email
| address, which is a massive pain in the ass to register AND
| then to read or reply to the mailing list.
|
| With a forum I register, chose an anonymous nickname and can
| participate and get updates into my normal inbox anonymously.
| shiomiru wrote:
| Also, SMTP straight up leaks your IP address when sending
| e-mails (the "Received" header.)
| waz0wski wrote:
| Possibly the most common open source mailing list software,
| mailman, has had configuration options to address both
| email address and header exposure for at least 15 years
|
| At least with email, you're in control of what shows up in
| your inbox as well as message routing with filters of your
| choice
| jjav wrote:
| > but there's no business model in it.
|
| I mean this is precisly why email is best. Being an open
| standard, it's not a business. Nobody owns it, nobody can.
| Those are fundamental to its strenght.
| eschaton wrote:
| What makes them "feel like 1970s technology" to you, and--more
| importantly--why do you say that like it's a bad thing?
|
| Most of the opposition I've seen to using mailing lists for
| technical discussion has basically come down to "young people
| think email is old and gross" and my position is that people
| reacting that way have some self-reflection to do and to get
| over themselves.
| deknos wrote:
| i am still of the opinion, if they would extend sieve quite a bit
| and standardize markdown/reST/asciidoc as rendered in
| emailreaders, we could probably get much more usage of mail again
|
| (sieve would need additional features of sending/processing mails
| and reencrypting imho)
|
| but mail is still less broken then mobile phone networks.
| jcgl wrote:
| Yes. And we'd also need people to stop demanding non-semantic
| hard wrapping at 79/80 chars.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Some resources on mailing lists from ArchiveTeam:
|
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Mailing_Lists
| commandersaki wrote:
| Some IETF working groups use Slack and it was pretty hard to get
| an invite e.g. QUIC WG.
| riobard wrote:
| What mail clients do you recommend that make mailing list UI/UX
| tolerable?
| max_ wrote:
| I use Gmail, but you have to turn on filters for that
| automatically label topics for it to work.
| jesprenj wrote:
| > They can be freely interconverted -- that is, you can move a
| list hosted by A using software B on operating system C to host X
| using software Y on operating system Z.
|
| Until you start heavily relying on your archive software you use
| that is accessible over HTTP with links hardcoded in messages.
| Then you're bound to continue using that software.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| Gmail top-posting and proportional fonts broke mailing lists for
| me.
| Sophira wrote:
| A lot of these arguments also apply to newsgroups (Usenet),
| however. It has the same features of being able to use whatever
| client you want, and can be archived.
|
| Archives can be searched fairly easily, although admittedly most
| will be incomplete (hence Deja and Google Groups back in the
| day).
|
| Some newsgroups are still active, but not many. Why? What went
| wrong?
| bell-cot wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| imcritic wrote:
| They mention a point where it's like enough to just have a mail
| client vs learning ui of 687 forums. This is so incredibly
| idiotic that I am just stunned.
| kertoip_1 wrote:
| > They impose minimal privacy risk.
|
| Absolutely not. Privacy risk depends on how well protected is the
| weakest point in your network. So if one of the participants'
| device is compromised then the entire discussion is compromised
| too.
|
| On closed, proprietary platform you just cut off the weakest
| point from access to the data when you suspect it is not
| protected enough, as data it lies on a single server. On mailing
| list you can't do anything, because data lies on somebody's
| else's server
| mixcocam wrote:
| What is the simplest way to setup a self hosted mailing list on a
| VPS?
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