Why Use Mailing Lists?

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/q6A_anL1u-Y9iXe-vboiOYamsl0/

69•cnst•1h ago

Comments

teddyh•1h ago

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>

mxchris2121•1h ago

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

teddyh•1h ago

I’ve heard good things about <https://mailinabox.email>.

giancarlostoro•1h ago

Same for self-hosted mail...

mrweasel•1h ago

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/

yogorenapan•58m ago

I've been using it for a year now. Can vouch for the quality and reliability

benley•1h ago

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.

Symbiote•54m ago

Same here — I think I set Mailman 3 up in a day, although I was already familiar with setting up the mail (Postfix) part.

magicalhippo•1h ago

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

mrweasel•1h ago

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.

WesolyKubeczek•49m ago

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.

adgjlsfhk1•1h ago

Discourse seems to fit the bill (although I'm not 100% sure about federation)

micromacrofoot•22m ago

it seems to have a plugin for federation, but I'm not sure how federation works for forums

o11c•52m ago

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 ...

SoftTalker•41m ago

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.

LaGrange•33m ago

> 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_.

thewebguyd•41m ago

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.

throw7•14m ago

Yes, I was hoping to check out ladybird browser project, but they use discord.

liendolucas•35m ago

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

gus_massa•20m ago

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.

Karrot_Kream•8m ago

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.

cnst•1h ago

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.

vrnvu•1h ago

Mailing list yes, RSS yes....

Old, boring, simple, works.

No ads.

a-dub•56m ago

how hard is it to run your own smtp gateway in 2025? are you good if you just set up dkim and such?

SoftTalker•47m ago

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.

cnst•40m ago

I'm pretty sure the reputation thing is overstated, else, how would all those providers be able to scale up their SMTP services themselves?

SoftTalker•33m ago

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.

cnst•28m ago

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.

SoftTalker•19m ago

Sendgrid, Mailchimp, et. al. ends up in the spam folder because most of what they send is spam.

micromacrofoot•21m ago

it's very easy to get blackholed by major providers like gmail though, and very difficult to get out

teeray•46m ago

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.

pron•29m ago

Also: notification and sorting are highly configurable through rules.

amo1111•23m ago

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...

self_awareness•13m ago

Is format=flowed too bleeding edge for those people?

velcrovan•6m ago

If I want reams of spam educating me on how to spell "pedophile" in Italian, I will join a mailing list.

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