Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why use mailing lists?

mailarchive.ietf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 202 posts

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#121

Post by eisa01 »

layer8 wrote: post #87
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.

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

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#122

Post by 7bit »

nickm12 wrote: post #102

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…

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#123

Post by charcircuit »

xigoi wrote: post #115
charcircuit wrote: post #47

>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…

> 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?

Not all mailing lists are public.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#124

Post by jcgl »

deknos wrote: post #104

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.

Yes. And we'd also need people to stop demanding non-semantic hard wrapping at 79/80 chars.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#125

Post by Intermernet »

Erwyn wrote: post #120
dminuoso wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mail…

> 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?

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#126

Post by shiomiru »

7bit wrote: post #122
nickm12 wrote: post #102

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…

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 in…

Also, SMTP straight up leaks your IP address when sending e-mails (the "Received" header.)

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#128

Post by skydhash »

arp242 wrote: post #112
pabs3 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#130

Post by avar »

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?

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.

Post reply on HN