What mail clients do you recommend that make mailing list UI/UX tolerable?
I use Gmail, but you have to turn on filters for that automatically label topics for it to work.
Why use mailing lists?
131–140 of 202 posts
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#132Like 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 >
Maybe Matrix?
I think Matrix is a good upcoming contender. The available clients are not really mature yet though. Element is excessively heavyweight and bloated, being Electron based. Other clients all seem to miss some essential feature or other. And there's no good archiving solution yet.
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#133> They can be freely interconverted -- that is, you can move a list
hosted by A using software B on operating system C to host X using
software Y on operating system Z.
Until you start heavily relying on your archive software you use that is accessible over HTTP with links hardcoded in messages. Then you're bound to continue using that software.
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#134Via http://www.mail-archive.com/nginx@nginx.org/msg25495.html . Sadly, it's been announced yesterday that the nginx.org mailing lists are being shutdown by end of month (Sept 2025). P.S. Probably one more reason to look into into the freenginx fork of nginx — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373327 — their mailing lists are at http://freenginx.org/en/support.html .
Also see https://en.angie.software
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#135Gmail top-posting and proportional fonts broke mailing lists for me.
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#136A lot of these arguments also apply to newsgroups (Usenet), however. It has the same features of being able to use whatever client you want, and can be archived.
Archives can be searched fairly easily, although admittedly most will be incomplete (hence Deja and Google Groups back in the day).
Some newsgroups are still active, but not many. Why? What went wrong?
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Newsgroups as in NNTP[1] fits those criteria, no? Granted, federated bit is more tricky now. Back in the days many if not most ISPs ran a NNTP server. But the protocol supports it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol
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.
The D programming language forum is using nntp:
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe Matrix?
I think Matrix is a good upcoming contender. The available clients are not really mature yet though. Element is excessively heavyweight and bloated, being Electron based. Other clients all seem to miss some essential feature or other. And there's no good archiving solution yet.
Matrix has/had a great archiver at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-viewer - but it fell foul of the bizarre failure mode that folks who had explicitly set their rooms to be archivable had subsequently forgotten that they had, and then went absolutely berserk when they discovered their rooms having been archived: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archi.... This was one of the reasons given for libera to turn off the liberamatrix irc bridge.
At the time we had much bigger problems to deal with, so we shelved it and have yet to get back to it.
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#139Like 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 >
Even within the realm of mailing lists I'm not sure it's as easy as it used to be to find reliable hosting.
Re: Why use mailing lists?
#140Earlier 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?
If you consistently don't receive mail you expect, then you stop giving money to your mail host and get a different one.