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Why use mailing lists?

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Re: Why use mailing lists?

#101

Post by magicalhippo »

clircle wrote: post #99
magicalhippo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, thanks. I knew there were issues, but somehow missed they'd resolved it.

A great service, glad to see it alive and kicking!

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#102

Post by nickm12 »

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#103

Post by pluto_modadic »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #48

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.…

the UI/UX of discord is definitely nice, but the /ethics/ of discord isn't.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#104

Post by deknos »

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#105

Post by shutton »

aidenn0 wrote: post #92

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…

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#106

Post by renegat0x0 »

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 >

Yesterday I seen someone claiming on Reddit that they stopped using mailing list in favour of using rss

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#107

Post by pabs3 »

arp242 wrote: post #96
layer8 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#108

Post by pabs3 »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #48

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 hate Discourse because I can't read it with a local email client.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#110

Post by pabs3 »

benley wrote: post #6
mxchris2121 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please inform me of an opensource way to run one that I can actually get configured properly.

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.

Mailman 3 is horrible, which is why some folks have ported Mailman 2 to Python3.

https://github.com/jaredmauch/mailman2-python3

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