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Why use mailing lists?

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Re: Why use mailing lists?

#81

Post by tonymet »

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).

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#82

Post by layer8 »

melodyogonna wrote: post #67

I still don't know how to get started with mailing lists. Is there some server you have to join?

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#83

Post by dfabulich »

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 >

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#84

Post by layer8 »

kajaktum wrote: post #60

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

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...

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#85

Post by layer8 »

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.

There are a lot of small email hosting providers that don’t seem to have much trouble.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#86

Post by s1110 »

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 >

IRC

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#87

Post by layer8 »

eisa01 wrote: post #52

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

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#88

Post by Bender »

cnst wrote: post #44
SoftTalker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sendgrid, Mailchimp, et. al. ends up in the spam folder because most of what they send is spam.

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…

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#89

Post by micromacrofoot »

eschaton wrote: post #41
micromacrofoot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

why is it bad for technical work? it seems like a very technical variety of forum

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#90

Post by crossroadsguy »

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.

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