171–180 of 202 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you don't host it yourself then you can change your provider if it fails you. Even if you host it yourself :-). The key is to own your domain.
If I recall the domain is not the only issue, IP is also deeply involved or am I wrong?
I’ve been running Gaggle Mail ( https://gaggle.email ) for over 10 years, and mailing lists are still very popular in certain circles. They’re especially valued for long-form discussions — legal groups, professional associations, HOAs, and similar communities still rely on them because they’re simple, reliable, and easy to archive.
how hard is it to run your own smtp gateway in 2025? are you good if you just set up dkim and such?
Or you can run a submission service that requires submitters to login, usually on port 587/465.
If you want to send from your server, that is way more difficult, requiring all kinds of safeguards, SPF, DKIM, ARC, reputation, etc. They keep making it more complicated, because that's the source of spam.
Or you can just submit mails to a relay, that will send mails for you, this can even be Google or some other MX service. This then always requires you to authenticate with your account.
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.
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 >
With email, there can be no limits because it is an open standard.
One can pick whichever MUA (email client) one prefers or trivially switch betwen multiple ones without any loss of data.
But even more importantly, if one has custom needs or preferences, that is also easy. All my incoming email goes first through procmail where I can apply various filters and labels and can sort it into different folders and priorities on completely custom criteria that fits what I want.
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 >
Literally any open-source forum or wiki meets all the requirements except possibly "federated" (depending on whether people set up a dump->restore to another machine), but is much more welcoming to ad-hoc contributors who don't want to subscribe to 10,000 emails per day just to get replies to their own posts. If mailing-list users actually used CC properly this would not be a problem, but THAT IS NOT THE REALITY WE L…
Proprietary mediums require and are limited to specific software with limitied functionality, whether in the form or a specific application, or a web interface that only works one way and is missing most functionality.
With email I run whatever email client I like best and can filter, sort, thread, etc just the way I want.
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…
I mean this is precisly why email is best. Being an open standard, it's not a business. Nobody owns it, nobody can. Those are fundamental to its strenght.
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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
Discourse would be fine if it were a front end to a mailing list and didn’t have the excess categorization and gamification crap. Instead it’s a web forum with a mailing list mode tacked on by people who never did substantial technical work using mailing lists.
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I find that people who complain about email volume are not only unfamiliar with setting up rules to file messages into folders, but entirely uninterested in learning how to leverage their tools that way. In fact, it seems many of them resent having to learn anything in order to be more productive, instead insisting the burden belongs on others. “I don’t want to get all that email, so it’s OK for me to make you visit…
It's replicated work for every person who wants to set up filters and notifications. Discord or whatever has defaults that don't require everyone to create their custom environment.
Nah. The “replicated work” is in deciding what you want your mail folder structure to look like, which is a pretty personal decision; creating the filter on List-Id itself is trivial.
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…
Most of the opposition I’ve seen to using mailing lists for technical discussion has basically come down to “young people think email is old and gross” and my position is that people reacting that way have some self-reflection to do and to get over themselves.