And those are the exact same reasons I loath the trend of discourse moving into discord groups, or slack groups, hell I've even seen Facebook groups.
None of those are reachable without an account and in many cases an invite (private by default), they are not indexed by search engines, they are proprietary, cannot be exported or archived, etc.
You say that like it's not already happening. It's happening. Many technical chats are only happening on discord now. Everything single day the volume of current technical knowledge gets smaller.
There are other problems besides access. The big one being that the people that you'll find on Discord are the kinds of people that you'll find on Discord.
> Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?
I mean, it’s the same reasons people used IRC for decades, and some people were unhappy if channels saved and published the IRC logs.
Informal asynchronous communication arguably has its place, and many people are more willing to speak plainly and without overthinking if what they say is not expected to be publically readable for decades.
Even if, of course, in public chat rooms someone could always record and share what is said without your consent, and if most people don’t say confidential things in public chatrooms about technical topics, there’s still something about a mailing list or forum that makes me personally speak less plainly compared to ephemeral channels.
I'm gradually switching our in-person community to Revolt [0] because we want to self-host and own the data. (Discord offers extreme convenience, but it's a black-box for-profit platform.)
We don't want casual discourse to be indexed to the public. Instead we'll host a wiki system soon that bubbles up technical chatter into worthy articles.
It's definitely better than discord in that it solves the data ownership problem. It's not federated, still centralized to your own revolt server - but I think that's OK for private groups anyway, or ephemeral discussions (unless Revolt can be federated, I'm not familiar with it)
My concern is more the trend of open groups, even open source projects, centralizing around discord both for dev discussion, community discussion, and technical support. There's incredible value to those discussions to be indexed and searchable on the web, like the good old days of public forums. Actual work took place in public, on mailing lists and forums. It could be indexed and scraped, even just archived to my local machine.
The distinction between chat and email and forums was helpful mentally to compartmentalize - you’d expect people to act differently (forums even have things they call “chat” threads that are more like chat).
The problem the “bubble up to Wiki” is that you need a specific subset of people with the technical know-how to understand the issue and solutions AND the time and desire to update the Wiki.
One thing that can help is being absolutely a tyrant and insisting that discussions about bugs, etc happen on a bug tracker- or at least the resolutions go there.
Mailing lists aren't federated. Everyone has to email one particular address at one particular domain; whoever controls that email address + domain can censor/block emails. (That's a good thing when you're blocking spam!)
If you're OK with the fact that mailing lists are somewhat centralized, there are actually got a ton of great alternatives to pure mailing lists.
All popular open-source web forums support email notifications, and most of them support posting by email, (I know phpBB and Discourse do,) and all of them have sitemaps with crawlable archives.
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 mailing list gives you even more federation possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange protocols.
> 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.
> 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.
This is where I disagree. In my opinion it might not be that hard but the maintenance is really not zero as you just described how you need a reputable IP as a prerequisite and constant monitoring of block lists.
Just having DKIM, SPF and DMARC really was not enough last time I checked for getting delivered to let's say outlook.
I just realised, and this could be red herring, that almost all of the domains I've administered were based in Australia. I suppose it's possible that the IP ranges I'm dealing with have a better reputation than those from other countries. I have administered a few domains from US companies and IPs, but they've often been based in known data centres which may help their cause. I can't really talk to the reliability of hosting a mail server on a consumer / small business IP in the US / Europe/ Asia. It's possible that all known, common IPs in these areas have a natural disadvantage when it comes to reputation. I suppose try running a tunnel from your server to a small VPS in a knwon data centre? Not ideal, but it may help.
It would be annoying if entire US/European/Asian ISP IP ranges were immediately blocked. We should have moved on from that for many reasons unrelated to email.
The monitoring of block lists is much more important than people assume. I haven't looked into it in detail, but it always seemed like the reputation was based on a ratio of number of messages to known bad messages. If you have a moderately busy server, and you manage to keep off the block lists (or at least pro-actively remove yourself from them) then the reputaion gets higher and higher, and the maintenance goes down.
If you're a domain that only receives occasional messages, and you end up on Spamhaus and co, you're gonna have a problem. It seems that reputation at small scale is viral. You need actively good reputation and response time. But, honestly, it seemed that it didn't take more than about 3 months per domain I administered until they were just accepted by the net as valid, good actors.
It's not about receiving. Receiving is the easy part. It is about the delivery of your own mail.
> you stop giving money to your mail host and get a different one.
I was entertaining the "host your own mail server" thought, I agree that if you don't host it yourself then you can change your provider if it fails you.
Who needs the transmission more - the sender, or the recipient?
Much of the time, when it's for signup verification, especially for a free service, they just write "don't use @live.microsoft.com" underneath the email address box. The user wants to be signed up for the service more than the service provider wants a new user, at least by enough to use an alternate email address. Enough cases like this, and the user quits @live.microsoft.com.
Sure but then your mail gets dropped on the other end: The main issue I had the last time I tried running my own setup for mails was basically getting an email to an outlook or live.microsoft address. My mails were dropped for no reason, effectively not landing in my friends mailboxes and without any error on my side to know that my mail was getting rejected.
This is when I decided to stop trying getting through with this and came back to paying a provider.
The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth. Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not necessary.
And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
> The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth. Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not necessary.
I agree to some extent. But it is more involved than deploying a Discourse instance in my opinion.
> And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
100% agree. This is the tradeoff I went for. I would love for it to be easier to self host but you can definitely use another provider.
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.
And conspiracy chain mails still pondering on whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. I joined usenet recently to see how the things were, and it had some serious ghost town vibes.
Even without Slack's ransomware-as-a-service business model, being dependent on a specific company is a big problem. If Dropbox decides to ban your country for being running too many AI crawlers, or DejaNews goes out of business, or XOJane decides to pivot to a different market (see http://web.archive.org/web/20171015000000*/http://www.xojane... for example), or LiveJournal gets bought by Russian trolls, it's potentially a big problem.
The sad reality is that for 99.99% or the population: WhatsApp groups, with a solid 1/5 in your requirement list. (Or at least, I hope they get one point, text selection is broken.)
People just not care, they just want to send and recive messages and an easy method to add and remove persons.
You understand I'm sure that federated is not the same as decentralized. Mailing lists are moderated, the list is hosted on a specific domain and that domain's owner can do whatever they want with the list. How is that different from a forum or some website? I don't like them but there mastodon,matrix,etc.. all open source and you can host them on a domain like you can a mailing list. They meet all your criteria.
I have an additional criteria to add: Security! I would like to authenticate that someone really said what is on the mailing list or its archives.
But before that, mailing lists are not as accessible as all the other options, because it all comes down to how accessible the email client is. Gmail is wildly different from mutt. Inconsistently accessible is what it is.
how about privacy? I wouldn't want my email and my email's domain published to the world to communicate with the list. And again with integrity, mailing list moderators can do all sorts of stuff (and I've seen plenty of shady and downright questionable practices).
How about we let things built for different times and with different requirements than what we have to day go to sleep quietly?
Mailing list delivery is centralized, but archiving is federated. How many folks have a full copy of, say, the last 1, 2, 5, 10 years of a long running mailing list?
Client accessibility is up to the individual user. They can choose whatever client fits them best.
I don’t know any mailing list software that signs messages as a sort of “yes, this message did travel through the mailing list” verification. Were it that important I’m sure it’s possible. But having identical messages on 1000 subscribers computers has to stand for something.
If the mailing list server tampered with the message, everyone will get the false message. But if it is an encrypted group chat on matrix for example, you can 100% verify that the person posted that message (provided you've verified them, but even if you haven't, your logic of other people having verified it can be used).
As for archiving, you can archive mastodon, lemmy, bluesky, matrix,etc... as you said, if it was important, it can be made so for any open platform. Public archiving services will use APIs instead of mail clients, that's the only difference which shouldn't make a difference to users.
Even on the closed source platform twitter, there are public archives of things. Governments post official communication and records on there. Some governments are experimenting with Git for law publications. Nepal just voted an interim leader over discord!
This nostalgic thinking about mailing lists is incompatible with a technologist's mindset.
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.
Lol this makes sense. I really respect the author of mailman3's dedication, but the architecture of the system is insane. There are 3 services -- the actual mail delivery piece, the admin interface, and the archiver -- all talking over various public and local interface, configuration is a nightmare, logs are all over the place, it takes over your system with scheduled cron jobs, there's some kind of built in console that I can't figure out how to use due to virtualenv issues plus cli commands that cover only some of the necessary functionality. It's gotten better since I run the tool as two docker containers, but still ends up being the most difficult service to administer and I administer quite a few
Besides GNU Mailman, there’s also Sympa [0]. It’s fairly straightforward to set those up on a VPS with Debian or similar if you’re familiar with running a Linux server.
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 LIVE IN. Bad technical etiquette on behalf of the habitual mailing-list users is the main reason people hate mailing lists.
===
Editing to also reject some of the points from the article:
"1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter bullshit. If you accept "must install a mail program", surely you can accept "must install lynx or curl"?
The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going to leak my email address or something?
... I don't even want to respond in detail to the rest of the nonsense that follows. Are they talking about some particular forum that hasn't been updated since 1999 or something? Yes these are problems which is why people have made solutions to them ...
My problem with forums is that I am forced to use a web browser and access them through their provided interface. A lot of them, especially the older ones, are seriously hard to use and even worse on mobile.
Mailing lists I access with my preferred mail client and environment.
Receiving "10,000 emails per day" would only happen on a very active list. In most cases you're talking about a dozen or at worst a few hundred. Your email client can easily filter those into a virtual folder, and quickly find the messages where you are addressed or threads you're interested in.
Once I have the emails, I have them forever. I am not dependent on some forum remaining online five years from now if I want to go find an old message.
Web forums and wikis just suck for message-based interactions. Email is designed for that and it works really well.
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 a web page several times a day to participate instead.”
And no, Discourse’s “mailing list mode” isn’t sufficient, it’s as garbage as the rest of Discourse, especially when D showed the right way to do this: Mailing list primary, NNTP newsgroup gatewayed (or vice versa), with a web forum for those who insist on one.
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.
But you trade a lot for not wanting to set up your own custom environment. You only have to set up yours. There is no one size that fits all, and if this flexibility comes with these features mentioned (non-proprietary, federated, archivable, accessible, not dependent on a specific company), then: yes, please! How could anyone not want this?
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.
> 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.
I know that mailing clients have gotten worse, but not _that_ worse.
> The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going to leak my email address or something?
Most of them employ a whole bunch of google analytics for reasons unclear. That should be sufficient.
---
Though unfortunately I disagree with the OP. Those are arguments as to why it would be nice if email stuck around. But it won't. Just because the problems come from "bad deployments of anti-spam policies" doesn't change the fact that the "bad deployments" are literally _the majority of email_.
> "1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter bullshit.
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.
This mostly falls under "Accessible", but want to highlight how incredibly limited the UI is in every proprietary messaging platform. One is forced to interact with it in just one way and it's inevitably missing tons of functionality.
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.
ActivityPub? Just because people use it as a Twitter clone doesn't mean you can't run mailing list style content on top of it. It would be nice to not use Mastodon-isms if you're trying to go about doing something like that. However it's easy with Mastodon-isms too. Have a bot listen to mentions, use any sort of moderation/accept queue to accept questions, then Reblog the ones you accept.
ATProto would fit most of the bill too here but AP is self-hostable and contained in a way that ATP isn't. AP is also standardized and has gone through standards bodies.
But if you want to write a message in reply or start a new conversation - RSS does not allow that. (In the cases that I use RSS - I will just copy to my mail app - it is more cumbersome than just replying in mail (or usenet via gmane) but this is not something I do often for those lists.
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.
And Element are consistently just not working in various ways, different every time. For example, recently I tried to join a room address from another server and was told "can't join that because a server address wasn't specified" but another address on the same server says "room not found" so it clearly did know the server address.
And there's the whole thing where you have to always be signed into at least one device at a time. If there's ever a time when you're not signed into any device, you have to reset your encryption key which means losing access to all old messages plus sending a notification to everyone you're in contact with. And I've had times when the reset button also just didn't work, throwing some error, so I was just locked out.
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 libera<->matrix 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.
I sometimes wonder why there aren't any chat-based apps/UIs for mailing lists? Think UIs in the style of Discord/Slack/Teams/etc but with email/mailinglist(s) as backend.
IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
The thing is, deltachat really focuses on encrypted-first, and if possible encrypted-only communications in tight-knit groups: servers have no authority, they're merely relays. Mailing lists are not built for that, they're the central authority point where all moderation happens, and being forwarders they can't work with e2ee. In the current setting deltachat isn't built for mailing lists but group or 1-1 communication work very well.
Mailing lists are largely a different mode of communication than chat, as alluded to in parts of TFA. I’d go as far as to say that mailing lists are mostly incompatible with chat-like usage patterns. It’s a feature, not a bug. Chat programs and protocols like IRC have existed almost as long as mailing lists, but were never a replacement for them.
I think one of the reasons is that mailing list usage expects/imposes some level of reflection time and editing between sending a new reply. Imagine if every time someone hit enter in slack/teams/discord a new email showed up in a thread somewhere in someone's mail reader.
You can self host an email server, what you can't self host is proprietary features on top of those, but I'm pretty sure you can find alternatives that work with said email server software you picked to self host.
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.
It has all sorts of gamification that gets in the way, it’s easy to over-silo discussions, it has a concept of “answered” that’s not really appropriate for a lot of project level discussion, it has all sorts of other extraneous crap like “reactions,” and—most importantly—it’s fundamentally implemented as a web page that everyone involved needs visit regularly to see when there’s something new and to respond to that.
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.
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 whatever email was sent last to the list, necroing the thread and changing topics to whatever is on their mind. I had to set threads to auto-lock after a week or two of inactivity to force people to start new topics for things that are, well, new topics.
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.
The value of the federated/decentralized nature of email is hard to overstate.
So many of the problems of modern technology are caused by centralization. It concentrates power and wealth into a handful of companies that now control the internet. It introduces extraordinary problems from managing data and services at global scales, which is the biggest technical challenge these companies face. It makes government surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc. It robs people of control over their data.
All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago. It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.
I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it here.
Besides, this distinction has been discussed ad nauseam, and is not interesting. Especially since when contrasted with centralization, which was my main point, both concepts avoid its issues.
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.
What makes them “feel like 1970s technology” to you, and—more importantly—why do you say that like it’s a bad thing?
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.
What makes them feel like 1970s technology: everyone has to manually manage their own archive and pay storage costs for media files, there is no way to share history (if you want), there is no integrated search, differences in clients mean that people have different experiences of the same message, there are no affordances like reactions that allow people to easily interact with a message without sending an entire separate message.
But maybe I should have said late 80s, early 90s tech. In the 70s, if you were communicating with others on a computer, you were almost certainly using the exact same software on the exact same time-shared system, where at least there was a symmetry of experiences (but no multimedia). The explosion of email clients happened in the 90s, mostly.
Oh no, people have to consider how they engage with others’ writing! They can’t just push a “like” or “thumbs down” button! There will be social pressure against it if they try to just send around picture or video memes instead of writing something thoughtful! And worst, everyone gets to be in control of their “experience of the same message,” by using the mail client that works best for them!
All of the reasons you say mailing lists are, let’s say, “dated” are actually benefits of using them, especially when using them for engineering purposes.
I agree that the available features can steer the online community culture and behaviors, but it's not determinative. I don't see why online communities should give up useful features just because other communities use them in a way you don't like.
I've been using mailing lists for about 30 years now. In the days before social networks, there was tons of forwarded crap and email chains, such that debunking them was a cottage industry. This behavior eventually moved to Facebook and Twitter which is perhaps why email lists seem more civilized these days, but I don't believe its the features that are driving it.
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.
Sorry, I disagree. The lack of a business model means a lack of competition and a weak market. For years I've been looking to find an email list hosting solution that works for a small family, sports team, friends group, etc. There is next to nothing in this space besides Google Groups. There are a few hosted mailing list solutions, but they have enterprise features and pricing.
$240/yr is a lot to just have a couple of family mailing lists. Even for creating mailing lists for youth sports teams, local civic orgs, and things like that it's really high.
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.
Possibly the most common open source mailing list software, mailman, has had configuration options to address both email address and header exposure for at least 15 years
At least with email, you're in control of what shows up in your inbox as well as message routing with filters of your choice
I loved and love mailing lists, except for their capacity for ensuring everyone's email addresses are out there in the open for everyone else, including the scammers and spammers. I still use them (very few! and almost none of them are "tech ones"). I have a dedicated email address for them, which is disposable but doesn't look the part. I do wish, though, that many more groups would adopt mailing lists.
I had started a small cinema/lit club/group and got some good traction as well. But everyone wanted to bring in the latest group chat toys, online meet toys. I had proposed (the async) mailing list (private; I had hoped I'd find one), and it was shot down immediately, IIRC, by everyone else.
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.
I think for internal corporate use, NNTP would work even better, if it were still supported in mail clients. I deployed it for exactly that purpose in the late 1990s and it was great.
Fortunately there are IMAP shared mailboxes, which we worked incredibly hard at CMU during the Cyrus project to ensure would work just as well as bboards did in CMU’s previous Andrew Mail System. (“Bulletin boards,” aka bboards, were basically CMU-local Usenet, with global Usenet under a netnews.* hierarchy via a gateway.)
Most IMAP clients worth their salt support shared mailbox hierarchies, even Apple Mail does, so it’s “just” a matter of setting up shared groups on a server.
I agree that NNTP would be better. I do have a NNTP server because of this, although my intention is that it can be used for public discussions and not only for internal corporate use, although I did implement authentication in case some newsgroups are used for private discussions too.
(Note, the article in the IETF mailing list does mention Usenet too)
A 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
I digitized HOA records and initially considered using a collaboration tool like Slack partnered with Google Drive to create an online community.
Although a corporation and their hierarchy can impose tools easily, HOA communities don't have that luxury. You have broad demographics, skills and no time to support any of them.
A bigger issue is credentialing. You don't want the business of helping seniors log into or reset their Slack password.
My ultimate "non-engineering" solution was to use email for everything. A mailing list for communications. Records requests are handled via email with some automation.
There's tremendous opportunity for more email Saas -- like Sourcehut but for other disciplines.
Everyone and everything can do email. It's easy to automate, and authentication is someone else's problem (the recipient only needs access to their inbox).
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]
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.
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.
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.
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).
It hasn't been done, because it's impossible. You might get the first 80%, maybe even the first 90% if you had enough money to hire top designers for several years, but you'll never reach Slack level polish.
Absolutely not. Privacy risk depends on how well protected is the weakest point in your network. So if one of the participants' device is compromised then the entire discussion is compromised too.
On closed, proprietary platform you just cut off the weakest point from access to the data when you suspect it is not protected enough, as data it lies on a single server. On mailing list you can't do anything, because data lies on somebody's else's server
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.
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.
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.
How so? Just because many people use mega-corp for email doesn't mean you need to. There are tons of alternative, small company providers or you can host your own. None of these require big-corp's support.
Because according to popular judgement, independent email hosting in the modern day is a very difficult ordeal.
Is that true? Is that false? How would one tell? One's own experience will be trivially handwaved away as an anecdote, people's experiences will be handwaved away as hearsay, and a claim of general consensus will be handwaved away by other claims that the person pointing it out is just living in a bubble. Principled thinking? Could be false, could be true, really - both would make sense. Doesn't sound very productive to discuss to me.
If nothing else, surely you can agree that despite what might be, what is is that email is incredibly centralized, right?
It is centralized (I wouldn't say "incredibly", but sufficiently) but because it is an open standard it doesn't matter. You can switch providers very easily with many options.
People need to subscribe to the mailing list, either by sending a subscribe email to the appropriate email address, or via a web interface that is specific to the mailing list server. Once subscribed, you simply send emails to the list’s email address, and receive emails from that address. It’s useful to set up a filter in your email account or email client so that all messages from a given mailing list are automatically sorted into a separate email folder.
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.
You can also host your own MX servers but use a provider for SMTP. Almost any mail provider that supports custom domains will work at their lowest price point.
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.
Gmail or Apple scaling up is going to be treated differently from some random new domain suddenly appearing on a Digital Ocean or Hetzner or AWS cloud instance.
But how would anyone know it's Gmail or Apple if the IP address is new?
That's exactly my point, that the reputation need is overstated by all those services that claim to solve a known problem that everyone has heard of, but noone has actually experienced, because, guess what, it might not actually exist.
I've seen plenty of cases where the emails sent out through Sendgrid et al, end up in the Spam folder, or these "professional" services don't even attempt to retry, thus, never getting through the greylisting, or other bugs which cause deliverability issues, which would never happen if you were to run your own real mail-server on your own hardware yourself.
I'm not disputing that assertion, yet it does go against the marketing materials we're all presented by all of these services, as for reasons to not run our own mailservers.
In other words, if all you want to do is run a personal mailserver, or even a corporate one, you'll probably not have to deal with this supposed IP reputation issue, unless the IP addresses you use, have already been added to the blacklists even before you start at it.
Running your own mail servers to do the volume emitted by Sendgrid would indeed be on the level of starting your own medium sized business. Getting IP allocation, swip'ing them out to divisions of your company or your customers and paying into whitelists for all the "free" email providers like Google et al would be a massive up front cost.
Running your own mail server for personal email is an afternoon of setup DKIM, DMARC, SPF, FCrDNS and such, setup of your MTA/IMAP/WEB preferences, tuning some filters, setting up aliases, accounts for family and with time the tuning work eventually slows down and then it's just maintaining accounts, aliases and the occasional rules to block problem networks and domains. With time you may find some servers that require lowering security or filters but that is also very easy.
Yes if you are using a domain that's been around for a while and has a reasonably stable IP address history and is not on any blacklists, that is the defintion of a "good" reputation. Or at least it's not a bad one.
Running an smtp server to receive mail is supereasy as long as you have inbound port 25.
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.
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 bandaids on top of what is the shitty unsecured and unencrypted email protocol.
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 and get you blacklisted worldwide. You need to fight with a milter and acme client to finally get the TLS stuff right too. Then there's the need to set up a spam filter for your inbox (probably).
> 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?
You need a good email client (and email editor) that provides some affordances for mailing lists, for sure. Apart from that, the fact that mailing lists use email provides at least half of their benefits, and of the reasons they endure.
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.
Wait, what? I regularly use marc-info (for OpenBSD) and emacs-devel, and it’s quite easy to find information. And you can always get the mbox and use something like mairix if you want local tools.
And I felt conflicted. Because it sounds great. It makes sense. But I don’t want it and now I’m wondering about what’s appealing about distributing bits of content across platforms.
This is something I can get behind. Fenced gardens.
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 simple
No, you have to figure out how to configure a mail client and how to properly respond to things and is no where as user friendly as typical social media apps.
>They impose minimal security risk
Using an external service lets you outsource security to dedicated security teams as opposed to no security team or a volunteer security guy.
>They impose minimal privacy risk.
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.
>Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly
The average internet user is scrolling through tiktok, streaming videos. Bandwidth is not a big deal anymore.
>Mailing lists interoperate.
Social media have features for reposting between different groups. There is also copy and paste and links.
>They're asynchronous
There are social media like facebook which are also asynchronous.
>They work reasonably well even in the presence
of multiple outages and severe congestion
Social media is also resistant to outages and have dedicated teams towards keeping it online.
>They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.
Have you not been on social media for decades? Pushing content to the user is the norm.
>They scale beautifully.
Social media scales to billions of people using them.
>they're relatively free of abuse vectors.
You can't pretend that spam does not exist.
Mailing lists are not mainstream and they never will be. That way of operating did not resonate with people at the scale that is needed to reach even tens of millions of people. Social media works. Chat apps work. Forums can work.
They mention a point where it's like enough to just have a mail client vs learning ui of 687 forums. This is so incredibly idiotic that I am just stunned.
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'm sure someone will come and tell me how all of this is doable with some janky interface or hacks on mailing lists. It's just unfortunate we have to choose. The people on mailing lists often argue vigorously for them, the rest of us are on discord/slack and have no idea they even exist and are repulsed by the usability problems. You can't convince me pasting diffs in an email thread is on par with Github/Gitlab code reviews with no downsides whatsoever.
At least at some point of time it was possible to order Discourse discussions as emails, which you can reply to, and it worked pretty much like a mailing list. Don't know how it is currently, though.
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>
And those are the exact same reasons I loath the trend of discourse moving into discord groups, or slack groups, hell I've even seen Facebook groups.
None of those are reachable without an account and in many cases an invite (private by default), they are not indexed by search engines, they are proprietary, cannot be exported or archived, etc.
It's asking for knowledge to be lost.
> It's asking for knowledge to be lost.
You say that like it's not already happening. It's happening. Many technical chats are only happening on discord now. Everything single day the volume of current technical knowledge gets smaller.
Yes, I was hoping to check out ladybird browser project, but they use discord.
There are other problems besides access. The big one being that the people that you'll find on Discord are the kinds of people that you'll find on Discord.
Yeah I tried to use Discord on two different occasions and each time I hated it.
Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?
> Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?
I mean, it’s the same reasons people used IRC for decades, and some people were unhappy if channels saved and published the IRC logs.
Informal asynchronous communication arguably has its place, and many people are more willing to speak plainly and without overthinking if what they say is not expected to be publically readable for decades.
Even if, of course, in public chat rooms someone could always record and share what is said without your consent, and if most people don’t say confidential things in public chatrooms about technical topics, there’s still something about a mailing list or forum that makes me personally speak less plainly compared to ephemeral channels.
I'm gradually switching our in-person community to Revolt [0] because we want to self-host and own the data. (Discord offers extreme convenience, but it's a black-box for-profit platform.)
We don't want casual discourse to be indexed to the public. Instead we'll host a wiki system soon that bubbles up technical chatter into worthy articles.
Is that a reasonable compromise?
[0] https://revolt.handmadecities.com
It's definitely better than discord in that it solves the data ownership problem. It's not federated, still centralized to your own revolt server - but I think that's OK for private groups anyway, or ephemeral discussions (unless Revolt can be federated, I'm not familiar with it)
My concern is more the trend of open groups, even open source projects, centralizing around discord both for dev discussion, community discussion, and technical support. There's incredible value to those discussions to be indexed and searchable on the web, like the good old days of public forums. Actual work took place in public, on mailing lists and forums. It could be indexed and scraped, even just archived to my local machine.
If I see discord, I just go the other way, or use the code as is.
The distinction between chat and email and forums was helpful mentally to compartmentalize - you’d expect people to act differently (forums even have things they call “chat” threads that are more like chat).
The problem the “bubble up to Wiki” is that you need a specific subset of people with the technical know-how to understand the issue and solutions AND the time and desire to update the Wiki.
One thing that can help is being absolutely a tyrant and insisting that discussions about bugs, etc happen on a bug tracker- or at least the resolutions go there.
Good advice, appreciate it!
I can live with requiring an account and not being indexed by search engines.
But the fact that Discord itself can't search Discord is beyond stupid. It's just a void of knowledge, people help other people, answer questions
And then they do it again, because search is completely useless.
Mailing lists aren't federated. Everyone has to email one particular address at one particular domain; whoever controls that email address + domain can censor/block emails. (That's a good thing when you're blocking spam!)
If you're OK with the fact that mailing lists are somewhat centralized, there are actually got a ton of great alternatives to pure mailing lists.
All popular open-source web forums support email notifications, and most of them support posting by email, (I know phpBB and Discourse do,) and all of them have sitemaps with crawlable archives.
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 mailing list gives you even more federation possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange protocols.
> 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.
> 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.
This is where I disagree. In my opinion it might not be that hard but the maintenance is really not zero as you just described how you need a reputable IP as a prerequisite and constant monitoring of block lists.
Just having DKIM, SPF and DMARC really was not enough last time I checked for getting delivered to let's say outlook.
I just realised, and this could be red herring, that almost all of the domains I've administered were based in Australia. I suppose it's possible that the IP ranges I'm dealing with have a better reputation than those from other countries. I have administered a few domains from US companies and IPs, but they've often been based in known data centres which may help their cause. I can't really talk to the reliability of hosting a mail server on a consumer / small business IP in the US / Europe/ Asia. It's possible that all known, common IPs in these areas have a natural disadvantage when it comes to reputation. I suppose try running a tunnel from your server to a small VPS in a knwon data centre? Not ideal, but it may help.
It would be annoying if entire US/European/Asian ISP IP ranges were immediately blocked. We should have moved on from that for many reasons unrelated to email.
The monitoring of block lists is much more important than people assume. I haven't looked into it in detail, but it always seemed like the reputation was based on a ratio of number of messages to known bad messages. If you have a moderately busy server, and you manage to keep off the block lists (or at least pro-actively remove yourself from them) then the reputaion gets higher and higher, and the maintenance goes down.
If you're a domain that only receives occasional messages, and you end up on Spamhaus and co, you're gonna have a problem. It seems that reputation at small scale is viral. You need actively good reputation and response time. But, honestly, it seemed that it didn't take more than about 3 months per domain I administered until they were just accepted by the net as valid, good actors.
If you consistently don't receive mail you expect, then you stop giving money to your mail host and get a different one.
It's not about receiving. Receiving is the easy part. It is about the delivery of your own mail.
> you stop giving money to your mail host and get a different one.
I was entertaining the "host your own mail server" thought, I agree that if you don't host it yourself then you can change your provider if it fails you.
Who needs the transmission more - the sender, or the recipient?
Much of the time, when it's for signup verification, especially for a free service, they just write "don't use @live.microsoft.com" underneath the email address box. The user wants to be signed up for the service more than the service provider wants a new user, at least by enough to use an alternate email address. Enough cases like this, and the user quits @live.microsoft.com.
> 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?
IP address is involved in some receiver's reputation calculation. It's never involved when sending to a domain.
Sure but then your mail gets dropped on the other end: The main issue I had the last time I tried running my own setup for mails was basically getting an email to an outlook or live.microsoft address. My mails were dropped for no reason, effectively not landing in my friends mailboxes and without any error on my side to know that my mail was getting rejected.
This is when I decided to stop trying getting through with this and came back to paying a provider.
The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth. Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not necessary.
And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
> The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth. Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not necessary.
I agree to some extent. But it is more involved than deploying a Discourse instance in my opinion.
> And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
100% agree. This is the tradeoff I went for. I would love for it to be easier to self host but you can definitely use another provider.
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.
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!
They have not resolved the big issue.
news.gmane.io has always worked.
The issue is that the owner of that domain made a mistake and gave the control of the web frontend to someone else who just shut it down.
The D programming language forum is using nntp:
https://forum.dlang.org/help#about
And conspiracy chain mails still pondering on whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. I joined usenet recently to see how the things were, and it had some serious ghost town vibes.
I would probably change "Not dependent on a specific company" to "Not being hostage from ransomware from specific companies".
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887
Even without Slack's ransomware-as-a-service business model, being dependent on a specific company is a big problem. If Dropbox decides to ban your country for being running too many AI crawlers, or DejaNews goes out of business, or XOJane decides to pivot to a different market (see http://web.archive.org/web/20171015000000*/http://www.xojane... for example), or LiveJournal gets bought by Russian trolls, it's potentially a big problem.
The sad reality is that for 99.99% or the population: WhatsApp groups, with a solid 1/5 in your requirement list. (Or at least, I hope they get one point, text selection is broken.)
People just not care, they just want to send and recive messages and an easy method to add and remove persons.
Forums are fine.
You understand I'm sure that federated is not the same as decentralized. Mailing lists are moderated, the list is hosted on a specific domain and that domain's owner can do whatever they want with the list. How is that different from a forum or some website? I don't like them but there mastodon,matrix,etc.. all open source and you can host them on a domain like you can a mailing list. They meet all your criteria.
I have an additional criteria to add: Security! I would like to authenticate that someone really said what is on the mailing list or its archives.
But before that, mailing lists are not as accessible as all the other options, because it all comes down to how accessible the email client is. Gmail is wildly different from mutt. Inconsistently accessible is what it is.
how about privacy? I wouldn't want my email and my email's domain published to the world to communicate with the list. And again with integrity, mailing list moderators can do all sorts of stuff (and I've seen plenty of shady and downright questionable practices).
How about we let things built for different times and with different requirements than what we have to day go to sleep quietly?
Mailing list delivery is centralized, but archiving is federated. How many folks have a full copy of, say, the last 1, 2, 5, 10 years of a long running mailing list?
Client accessibility is up to the individual user. They can choose whatever client fits them best.
I don’t know any mailing list software that signs messages as a sort of “yes, this message did travel through the mailing list” verification. Were it that important I’m sure it’s possible. But having identical messages on 1000 subscribers computers has to stand for something.
If the mailing list server tampered with the message, everyone will get the false message. But if it is an encrypted group chat on matrix for example, you can 100% verify that the person posted that message (provided you've verified them, but even if you haven't, your logic of other people having verified it can be used).
As for archiving, you can archive mastodon, lemmy, bluesky, matrix,etc... as you said, if it was important, it can be made so for any open platform. Public archiving services will use APIs instead of mail clients, that's the only difference which shouldn't make a difference to users.
Even on the closed source platform twitter, there are public archives of things. Governments post official communication and records on there. Some governments are experimenting with Git for law publications. Nepal just voted an interim leader over discord!
This nostalgic thinking about mailing lists is incompatible with a technologist's mindset.
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
Lol this makes sense. I really respect the author of mailman3's dedication, but the architecture of the system is insane. There are 3 services -- the actual mail delivery piece, the admin interface, and the archiver -- all talking over various public and local interface, configuration is a nightmare, logs are all over the place, it takes over your system with scheduled cron jobs, there's some kind of built in console that I can't figure out how to use due to virtualenv issues plus cli commands that cover only some of the necessary functionality. It's gotten better since I run the tool as two docker containers, but still ends up being the most difficult service to administer and I administer quite a few
Same here — I think I set Mailman 3 up in a day, although I was already familiar with setting up the mail (Postfix) part.
I’ve heard good things about <https://mailinabox.email>.
Besides GNU Mailman, there’s also Sympa [0]. It’s fairly straightforward to set those up on a VPS with Debian or similar if you’re familiar with running a Linux server.
[0] https://www.sympa.community/
Same for self-hosted mail...
I haven't tried it, so it might be more complicated than the documentation leads me to believe, but Mox looks promising: https://www.xmox.nl/
I've been using it for a year now. Can vouch for the quality and reliability
I use Postfix and Dovecot. Configuration was annoying, but doable. If you read mail on the server itself then you don't need Dovecot.
Proxmox has a mail appliance.
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 LIVE IN. Bad technical etiquette on behalf of the habitual mailing-list users is the main reason people hate mailing lists.
===
Editing to also reject some of the points from the article:
"1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter bullshit. If you accept "must install a mail program", surely you can accept "must install lynx or curl"?
The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going to leak my email address or something?
... I don't even want to respond in detail to the rest of the nonsense that follows. Are they talking about some particular forum that hasn't been updated since 1999 or something? Yes these are problems which is why people have made solutions to them ...
My problem with forums is that I am forced to use a web browser and access them through their provided interface. A lot of them, especially the older ones, are seriously hard to use and even worse on mobile.
Mailing lists I access with my preferred mail client and environment.
Receiving "10,000 emails per day" would only happen on a very active list. In most cases you're talking about a dozen or at worst a few hundred. Your email client can easily filter those into a virtual folder, and quickly find the messages where you are addressed or threads you're interested in.
Once I have the emails, I have them forever. I am not dependent on some forum remaining online five years from now if I want to go find an old message.
Web forums and wikis just suck for message-based interactions. Email is designed for that and it works really well.
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 a web page several times a day to participate instead.”
And no, Discourse’s “mailing list mode” isn’t sufficient, it’s as garbage as the rest of Discourse, especially when D showed the right way to do this: Mailing list primary, NNTP newsgroup gatewayed (or vice versa), with a web forum for those who insist on one.
If only LLVM et al had gone that route.
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.
But you trade a lot for not wanting to set up your own custom environment. You only have to set up yours. There is no one size that fits all, and if this flexibility comes with these features mentioned (non-proprietary, federated, archivable, accessible, not dependent on a specific company), then: yes, please! How could anyone not want this?
“It sucks for everyone equally, so it’s better.”
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.
https://www.tapatalk.com/introduction is a thing
They use some kind of API to connect to forums and display them on mobile in a semi-unified UI.
There's nothing stopping anyone from creating an application that uses the same APIs and provides the contents in a more fitting format.
> 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.
I know that mailing clients have gotten worse, but not _that_ worse.
> The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going to leak my email address or something?
Most of them employ a whole bunch of google analytics for reasons unclear. That should be sufficient.
---
Though unfortunately I disagree with the OP. Those are arguments as to why it would be nice if email stuck around. But it won't. Just because the problems come from "bad deployments of anti-spam policies" doesn't change the fact that the "bad deployments" are literally _the majority of email_.
> "1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter bullshit.
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.
This mostly falls under "Accessible", but want to highlight how incredibly limited the UI is in every proprietary messaging platform. One is forced to interact with it in just one way and it's inevitably missing tons of functionality.
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.
ActivityPub? Just because people use it as a Twitter clone doesn't mean you can't run mailing list style content on top of it. It would be nice to not use Mastodon-isms if you're trying to go about doing something like that. However it's easy with Mastodon-isms too. Have a bot listen to mentions, use any sort of moderation/accept queue to accept questions, then Reblog the ones you accept.
ATProto would fit most of the bill too here but AP is self-hostable and contained in a way that ATP isn't. AP is also standardized and has gone through standards bodies.
Even within the realm of mailing lists I'm not sure it's as easy as it used to be to find reliable hosting.
Yesterday I seen someone claiming on Reddit that they stopped using mailing list in favour of using rss
Yes that works to read them - and I do use that.
But if you want to write a message in reply or start a new conversation - RSS does not allow that. (In the cases that I use RSS - I will just copy to my mail app - it is more cumbersome than just replying in mail (or usenet via gmane) but this is not something I do often for those lists.
This is why I run a newsletter.
I love the simplicity of it.
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.
And Element are consistently just not working in various ways, different every time. For example, recently I tried to join a room address from another server and was told "can't join that because a server address wasn't specified" but another address on the same server says "room not found" so it clearly did know the server address.
And there's the whole thing where you have to always be signed into at least one device at a time. If there's ever a time when you're not signed into any device, you have to reset your encryption key which means losing access to all old messages plus sending a notification to everyone you're in contact with. And I've had times when the reset button also just didn't work, throwing some error, so I was just locked out.
> If there's ever a time when you're not signed into any device, you have to reset your encryption key, meaning you lose access to all old messages...
That is a deal breaker, IMO. Encryption is great, but it shouldn't come at the price of data loss and a degraded user experience.
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 libera<->matrix 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.
I sometimes wonder why there aren't any chat-based apps/UIs for mailing lists? Think UIs in the style of Discord/Slack/Teams/etc but with email/mailinglist(s) as backend.
IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
Deltachat is still alive and well, you can see it evolve on their blog: https://delta.chat/en/blog
The thing is, deltachat really focuses on encrypted-first, and if possible encrypted-only communications in tight-knit groups: servers have no authority, they're merely relays. Mailing lists are not built for that, they're the central authority point where all moderation happens, and being forwarders they can't work with e2ee. In the current setting deltachat isn't built for mailing lists but group or 1-1 communication work very well.
Mailing lists are largely a different mode of communication than chat, as alluded to in parts of TFA. I’d go as far as to say that mailing lists are mostly incompatible with chat-like usage patterns. It’s a feature, not a bug. Chat programs and protocols like IRC have existed almost as long as mailing lists, but were never a replacement for them.
I think one of the reasons is that mailing list usage expects/imposes some level of reflection time and editing between sending a new reply. Imagine if every time someone hit enter in slack/teams/discord a new email showed up in a thread somewhere in someone's mail reader.
First inform us of mail providers that match the same criteria.
All, as far as I can tell.
Is Gmail non-propietary? Can you self host it?
You can self host an email server, what you can't self host is proprietary features on top of those, but I'm pretty sure you can find alternatives that work with said email server software you picked to self host.
IRC
RSS?
Discourse seems to fit the bill (although I'm not 100% sure about federation)
it seems to have a plugin for federation, but I'm not sure how federation works for forums
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
It has all sorts of gamification that gets in the way, it’s easy to over-silo discussions, it has a concept of “answered” that’s not really appropriate for a lot of project level discussion, it has all sorts of other extraneous crap like “reactions,” and—most importantly—it’s fundamentally implemented as a web page that everyone involved needs visit regularly to see when there’s something new and to respond to that.
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.
Sounds like a similar feature set to github tbh
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 whatever email was sent last to the list, necroing the thread and changing topics to whatever is on their mind. I had to set threads to auto-lock after a week or two of inactivity to force people to start new topics for things that are, well, new topics.
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.
Interesting. You could do the same thing automatically on the mailing list server side, right?
Almost like the UX of mailing lists isn't actually that good...
Our HoA uses google groups. Mild spam, but overall pretty good for threads. Too many people spam everyone asking for a plumber or whatever
The value of the federated/decentralized nature of email is hard to overstate.
So many of the problems of modern technology are caused by centralization. It concentrates power and wealth into a handful of companies that now control the internet. It introduces extraordinary problems from managing data and services at global scales, which is the biggest technical challenge these companies face. It makes government surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc. It robs people of control over their data.
All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago. It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.
I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it here.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296810
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44327508
> federated/decentralized
I'd be really quite hesitant to blur these concepts so casually.
I'm not blurring them. Email is both.
Besides, this distinction has been discussed ad nauseam, and is not interesting. Especially since when contrasted with centralization, which was my main point, both concepts avoid its issues.
Via 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
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.
What makes them “feel like 1970s technology” to you, and—more importantly—why do you say that like it’s a bad thing?
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.
What makes them feel like 1970s technology: everyone has to manually manage their own archive and pay storage costs for media files, there is no way to share history (if you want), there is no integrated search, differences in clients mean that people have different experiences of the same message, there are no affordances like reactions that allow people to easily interact with a message without sending an entire separate message.
But maybe I should have said late 80s, early 90s tech. In the 70s, if you were communicating with others on a computer, you were almost certainly using the exact same software on the exact same time-shared system, where at least there was a symmetry of experiences (but no multimedia). The explosion of email clients happened in the 90s, mostly.
Oh no, people have to consider how they engage with others’ writing! They can’t just push a “like” or “thumbs down” button! There will be social pressure against it if they try to just send around picture or video memes instead of writing something thoughtful! And worst, everyone gets to be in control of their “experience of the same message,” by using the mail client that works best for them!
All of the reasons you say mailing lists are, let’s say, “dated” are actually benefits of using them, especially when using them for engineering purposes.
I agree that the available features can steer the online community culture and behaviors, but it's not determinative. I don't see why online communities should give up useful features just because other communities use them in a way you don't like.
I've been using mailing lists for about 30 years now. In the days before social networks, there was tons of forwarded crap and email chains, such that debunking them was a cottage industry. This behavior eventually moved to Facebook and Twitter which is perhaps why email lists seem more civilized these days, but I don't believe its the features that are driving it.
> but there's no business model in it.
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.
Sorry, I disagree. The lack of a business model means a lack of competition and a weak market. For years I've been looking to find an email list hosting solution that works for a small family, sports team, friends group, etc. There is next to nothing in this space besides Google Groups. There are a few hosted mailing list solutions, but they have enterprise features and pricing.
groups.io is decent if you're looking for hosted solutions. Most of the mailing lists I'm on that used to be on yahoo groups moved to groups.io
$240/yr is a lot to just have a couple of family mailing lists. Even for creating mailing lists for youth sports teams, local civic orgs, and things like that it's really high.
groups.io lists are free for lists with under 100 participants, the $20/mo would be for a premium plan which doesn't sound like you'd need that.
https://groups.io/static/compare
google mailing lists are also free. I still host one there, although mostly try to not use google. But it's another free choice.
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.
Also, SMTP straight up leaks your IP address when sending e-mails (the "Received" header.)
Possibly the most common open source mailing list software, mailman, has had configuration options to address both email address and header exposure for at least 15 years
At least with email, you're in control of what shows up in your inbox as well as message routing with filters of your choice
I loved and love mailing lists, except for their capacity for ensuring everyone's email addresses are out there in the open for everyone else, including the scammers and spammers. I still use them (very few! and almost none of them are "tech ones"). I have a dedicated email address for them, which is disposable but doesn't look the part. I do wish, though, that many more groups would adopt mailing lists.
I had started a small cinema/lit club/group and got some good traction as well. But everyone wanted to bring in the latest group chat toys, online meet toys. I had proposed (the async) mailing list (private; I had hoped I'd find one), and it was shot down immediately, IIRC, by everyone else.
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.
I think for internal corporate use, NNTP would work even better, if it were still supported in mail clients. I deployed it for exactly that purpose in the late 1990s and it was great.
Fortunately there are IMAP shared mailboxes, which we worked incredibly hard at CMU during the Cyrus project to ensure would work just as well as bboards did in CMU’s previous Andrew Mail System. (“Bulletin boards,” aka bboards, were basically CMU-local Usenet, with global Usenet under a netnews.* hierarchy via a gateway.)
Most IMAP clients worth their salt support shared mailbox hierarchies, even Apple Mail does, so it’s “just” a matter of setting up shared groups on a server.
I agree that NNTP would be better. I do have a NNTP server because of this, although my intention is that it can be used for public discussions and not only for internal corporate use, although I did implement authentication in case some newsgroups are used for private discussions too.
(Note, the article in the IETF mailing list does mention Usenet too)
As someone who has grown up in the era of forums. I have a new found appreciation for mailing lists. I did recently come across some interesting mailing list archives from the 80s https://github.com/MITDDC/cpmarchive-1979-1984/blob/main/cpm...
A 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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Mailing list yes, RSS yes....
Old, boring, simple, works.
No ads.
The irony of talking about loving mailing list … while we’re all using a centralized, proprietary web forum (HN) to talk about it.
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.
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.
> 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.
I digitized HOA records and initially considered using a collaboration tool like Slack partnered with Google Drive to create an online community.
Although a corporation and their hierarchy can impose tools easily, HOA communities don't have that luxury. You have broad demographics, skills and no time to support any of them.
A bigger issue is credentialing. You don't want the business of helping seniors log into or reset their Slack password.
My ultimate "non-engineering" solution was to use email for everything. A mailing list for communications. Records requests are handled via email with some automation.
There's tremendous opportunity for more email Saas -- like Sourcehut but for other disciplines.
Everyone and everything can do email. It's easy to automate, and authentication is someone else's problem (the recipient only needs access to their inbox).
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.
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.
It depends on your client, if you have one with bad UX, then get a better one.
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).
It hasn't been done, because it's impossible. You might get the first 80%, maybe even the first 90% if you had enough money to hire top designers for several years, but you'll never reach Slack level polish.
To be honest, I had a lot more trouble finding the tree there than understanding what it shows per se.
> They impose minimal privacy risk.
Absolutely not. Privacy risk depends on how well protected is the weakest point in your network. So if one of the participants' device is compromised then the entire discussion is compromised too.
On closed, proprietary platform you just cut off the weakest point from access to the data when you suspect it is not protected enough, as data it lies on a single server. On mailing list you can't do anything, because data lies on somebody's else's server
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.
Are you the owner? Any way to DM?
Is format=flowed too bleeding edge for those people?
It'd be a bit too readable without the hard wraps at 80 chars. They just gotta spice up that plain text ever so little.
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.
I was trying to make a modern version of mailing lists with Booklet [1] - it just never got traction. I intend to open-source it soon. [2]
Async communications are underrated.
[1]: https://booklet.group
[2]: I did open-source my other project recently, though - so it's not an entirely hollow intention!
Some IETF working groups use Slack and it was pretty hard to get an invite e.g. QUIC WG.
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.
Think twice
How so? Just because many people use mega-corp for email doesn't mean you need to. There are tons of alternative, small company providers or you can host your own. None of these require big-corp's support.
Because according to popular judgement, independent email hosting in the modern day is a very difficult ordeal.
Is that true? Is that false? How would one tell? One's own experience will be trivially handwaved away as an anecdote, people's experiences will be handwaved away as hearsay, and a claim of general consensus will be handwaved away by other claims that the person pointing it out is just living in a bubble. Principled thinking? Could be false, could be true, really - both would make sense. Doesn't sound very productive to discuss to me.
If nothing else, surely you can agree that despite what might be, what is is that email is incredibly centralized, right?
It is centralized (I wouldn't say "incredibly", but sufficiently) but because it is an open standard it doesn't matter. You can switch providers very easily with many options.
Some resources on mailing lists from ArchiveTeam:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Mailing_Lists
Gmail top-posting and proportional fonts broke mailing lists for me.
I still don't know how to get started with mailing lists. Is there some server you have to join?
You can set up an email list using Google Groups, for instance. As an example for such a list, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767555.
People need to subscribe to the mailing list, either by sending a subscribe email to the appropriate email address, or via a web interface that is specific to the mailing list server. Once subscribed, you simply send emails to the list’s email address, and receive emails from that address. It’s useful to set up a filter in your email account or email client so that all messages from a given mailing list are automatically sorted into a separate email folder.
What is the simplest way to setup a self hosted mailing list on a VPS?
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.
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.
You can also host your own MX servers but use a provider for SMTP. Almost any mail provider that supports custom domains will work at their lowest price point.
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.
Gmail or Apple scaling up is going to be treated differently from some random new domain suddenly appearing on a Digital Ocean or Hetzner or AWS cloud instance.
But how would anyone know it's Gmail or Apple if the IP address is new?
That's exactly my point, that the reputation need is overstated by all those services that claim to solve a known problem that everyone has heard of, but noone has actually experienced, because, guess what, it might not actually exist.
I've seen plenty of cases where the emails sent out through Sendgrid et al, end up in the Spam folder, or these "professional" services don't even attempt to retry, thus, never getting through the greylisting, or other bugs which cause deliverability issues, which would never happen if you were to run your own real mail-server on your own hardware yourself.
Sendgrid, Mailchimp, et. al. ends up in the spam folder because most of what they send is spam.
I'm not disputing that assertion, yet it does go against the marketing materials we're all presented by all of these services, as for reasons to not run our own mailservers.
In other words, if all you want to do is run a personal mailserver, or even a corporate one, you'll probably not have to deal with this supposed IP reputation issue, unless the IP addresses you use, have already been added to the blacklists even before you start at it.
Running your own mail servers to do the volume emitted by Sendgrid would indeed be on the level of starting your own medium sized business. Getting IP allocation, swip'ing them out to divisions of your company or your customers and paying into whitelists for all the "free" email providers like Google et al would be a massive up front cost.
Running your own mail server for personal email is an afternoon of setup DKIM, DMARC, SPF, FCrDNS and such, setup of your MTA/IMAP/WEB preferences, tuning some filters, setting up aliases, accounts for family and with time the tuning work eventually slows down and then it's just maintaining accounts, aliases and the occasional rules to block problem networks and domains. With time you may find some servers that require lowering security or filters but that is also very easy.
Yes if you are using a domain that's been around for a while and has a reasonably stable IP address history and is not on any blacklists, that is the defintion of a "good" reputation. Or at least it's not a bad one.
There are a lot of small email hosting providers that don’t seem to have much trouble.
it's very easy to get blackholed by major providers like gmail though, and very difficult to get out
Running an smtp server to receive mail is supereasy as long as you have inbound port 25.
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.
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 bandaids on top of what is the shitty unsecured and unencrypted email protocol.
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 and get you blacklisted worldwide. You need to fight with a milter and acme client to finally get the TLS stuff right too. Then there's the need to set up a spam filter for your inbox (probably).
> 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?
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.
The only thing keeping me away from mailing lists is them being built on top of email.
You need a good email client (and email editor) that provides some affordances for mailing lists, for sure. Apart from that, the fact that mailing lists use email provides at least half of their benefits, and of the reasons they endure.
Also: notification and sorting are highly configurable through rules.
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
Wait, what? I regularly use marc-info (for OpenBSD) and emacs-devel, and it’s quite easy to find information. And you can always get the mbox and use something like mairix if you want local tools.
I was over reading that (very well-written) explanation of the AT Protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388021
And I felt conflicted. Because it sounds great. It makes sense. But I don’t want it and now I’m wondering about what’s appealing about distributing bits of content across platforms.
This is something I can get behind. Fenced gardens.
>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 simple
No, you have to figure out how to configure a mail client and how to properly respond to things and is no where as user friendly as typical social media apps.
>They impose minimal security risk
Using an external service lets you outsource security to dedicated security teams as opposed to no security team or a volunteer security guy.
>They impose minimal privacy risk.
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.
>Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly
The average internet user is scrolling through tiktok, streaming videos. Bandwidth is not a big deal anymore.
>Mailing lists interoperate.
Social media have features for reposting between different groups. There is also copy and paste and links.
>They're asynchronous
There are social media like facebook which are also asynchronous.
>They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple outages and severe congestion
Social media is also resistant to outages and have dedicated teams towards keeping it online.
>They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.
Have you not been on social media for decades? Pushing content to the user is the norm.
>They scale beautifully.
Social media scales to billions of people using them.
>they're relatively free of abuse vectors.
You can't pretend that spam does not exist.
Mailing lists are not mainstream and they never will be. That way of operating did not resonate with people at the scale that is needed to reach even tens of millions of people. Social media works. Chat apps work. Forums can work.
> 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.
They mention a point where it's like enough to just have a mail client vs learning ui of 687 forums. This is so incredibly idiotic that I am just stunned.
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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'm sure someone will come and tell me how all of this is doable with some janky interface or hacks on mailing lists. It's just unfortunate we have to choose. The people on mailing lists often argue vigorously for them, the rest of us are on discord/slack and have no idea they even exist and are repulsed by the usability problems. You can't convince me pasting diffs in an email thread is on par with Github/Gitlab code reviews with no downsides whatsoever.
the UI/UX of discord is definitely nice, but the /ethics/ of discord isn't.
Discourse not Discord
I hate Discourse because I can't read it with a local email client.
?!
Discourse is a "mailing list with the interface". It allows both replies over email and starting a new topic over email.
Discourse is a more like a forum with a lip-service email interface tacked on, similar to GitHub or any of the web-generation tools.
At least at some point of time it was possible to order Discourse discussions as emails, which you can reply to, and it worked pretty much like a mailing list. Don't know how it is currently, though.
I hate the look of Discourse, it looks like the worst case of a phone app and ""modern"" web design
I think it's primarily due to absence of margins on the sides and thin borders