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Why use mailing lists?

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Re: Why use mailing lists?

#21

Post by thewebguyd »

teddyh wrote: post #2

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 >

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#22

Post by cnst »

SoftTalker wrote: post #18
a-dub wrote: post #14

how hard is it to run your own smtp gateway in 2025? are you good if you just set up dkim and such?

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.

I'm pretty sure the reputation thing is overstated, else, how would all those providers be able to scale up their SMTP services themselves?

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#23

Post by liendolucas »

teddyh wrote: post #2

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 >

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

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#24

Post by SoftTalker »

cnst wrote: post #22
SoftTalker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure the reputation thing is overstated, else, how would all those providers be able to scale up their SMTP services themselves?

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#25

Post by LaGrange »

o11c wrote: post #16
teddyh wrote: post #2

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 >

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 L…

> 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_.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#27

Post by cnst »

SoftTalker wrote: post #24
cnst wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the reputation thing is overstated, else, how would all those providers be able to scale up their SMTP services themselves?

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.

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#28

Post by 62 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #21
teddyh wrote: post #2

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 >

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.

> 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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#30

Post by micromacrofoot »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #9
teddyh wrote: post #2

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 >

Discourse seems to fit the bill (although I'm not 100% sure about federation)

it seems to have a plugin for federation, but I'm not sure how federation works for forums
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