Ask HN: What are the good alternatives to Google Groups?

14 points by niyazpk ↗ HN
That is pretty much it. Any suggestions?

12 comments

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I've been looking for one too. The Google Groups interface is really bad, Google Groups is riddled with spam and Google seems to make no effort to do anything about it.

I've looked at librelist.com, which seems OK, but they subscribe you as soon as you send an email to a list, which makes it useless, at least for me (I don't want people to get subscribed to all mail as soon as they send a single post; it also discourages cross-list postings).

One of the best options might be to host your own mailing list using something like mailman and adding a frontend with something like Nabble.

I think Zed Shaw is working on an alternative but I don't remember the name
Librelist. I'd recommend to the OP that he/she pass on any criticism of Google Groups on to Zed. Looks like that project is ready to be the GG killer. :)
(comment deleted)
I wish google groups had an API and then I would love it.
Does nobody remember Usenet any more?
Just want to second that google groups is a pain, and it's a shame that everyone seems to be using it nowadays (albeit for understandable reasons).

My pet peeve is their ignorance of traditional mailing list behaviour in terms of echo'ing back your own posts to you. Google Groups doesn't do it, every other mailing list software in existence does it. Which means users who happen to not use GMail as their client (yes, they do exist) have to deal with both variants - a small but constant nuisance.