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Why use mailing lists?

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Re: Why use mailing lists?

#91

Post by aidenn0 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #40

Protocols not platforms. Email is something anyone can use without a megacorp giving permission!

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#92

Post by aidenn0 »

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My family plans all of their reunions via e-mail and every year we end up with someone putting an out-of-date e-mail for someone in the list, or forgetting to include someone, or including someone who has asked to not get updates.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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#93

Post by aidenn0 »

teeray wrote: post #19

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 whateve…

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#94

Post by msm_ »

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?

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#95

Post by nanolith »

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#96

Post by arp242 »

layer8 wrote: post #84
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...

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#97

Post by arp242 »

mcdow wrote: post #74
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

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?

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).

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#99

Post by clircle »

magicalhippo wrote: post #71
mrweasel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

News.gmane.io is up. I use it daily to track a few projects.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#100

Post by floren »

bruce343434 wrote: post #58
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?

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 b…

> 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?

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