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Ask HN: Best current mailing list manager?

84 points by zimpenfish ↗ HN
Of the mailman, ecartis, etc. genre; not the newsletter marketing mass shot genre.

Ecartis has done sterling work for years but even back then it was effectively abandonware. Something nice and simple I can run in Docker or a single binary would be perfect.

61 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 61.6 ms ] thread
adamfeldman
I believe Discourse can be used as a mailing list manager: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-email-mailing-list..., https://github.com/discourse/discourse
generalpass
Even before Discourse I recall forum software that managed mailing lists. There was usually a sticky with a message warning forum users that each post is sent out as an email, so be respectful of this and format accordingly should you desire a response.

EDIT:

I actually don't know if it was forum software or just mailman plugged into the forum somehow.

zimpenfish
Looks interesting but as with the sr.hut stuff, Rails + Ember + Postgres + Redis is too much for a mailing list.
sam_goody
I tried using Discourse for a while.

The setup was not so bad.

But it really failed as a mailing list, as there was no way to respond to the sender without responding to all. There was a plugin that caused more issues than it solved.

It has been several months, not sure if it improved since then.

geocrasher
I think this segment has mostly moved to groups.io, which is of course hosted. Other than that, mailman is still in use in a lot of places. It's not great, but it still works.
ddevault
Consider my platform: https://sourcehut.org

Example list: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev

generalpass
> All features work without JavaScript

Bravo!

zimpenfish
It looks really good but I'm really after something small for private mailing lists entirely under my control - a standalone lists.sr.hut might work but (at least) 4 daemons and Celery (I already have Redis) is many moving parts.
ddevault
Well, the daemons would be postfix, listssrht-lmtp, listssrht-process, the website, and something like nginx, plus postgresql and redis - so more like 7 :) but it's pretty easy to set up, and there are good reasons for these things being separate processes. The LMTP daemon is separate from process, so you can quickly accept mail and then take your time forwarding, or scale out mail forwarding to several processes/machines for large lists. This is separate from the web app so that they don't clog each other up and can be deployed/scaled separately.

For standalone installations you can also set up aliases like foobar@lists.example.org rather than ~username/foobar@lists.example.org.

Docs if you decide to give it a shot:

https://man.sr.ht/installation.md

zimpenfish
If I can't figure out how to hack around these problems in the Ecartis source code before I go mad, lists.sr.ht is definitely going to get its chance.
ddevault
Oh, check this out too:

https://github.com/eXeC64/nanolist

zimpenfish
Now that one is (assuming it works) perfect! Thank you! I have no idea why Google couldn't be bothered showing me that one in the many searches I did but I suppose I should have searched Github too.
zimpenfish
That didn't work due to what I think is exim's weirdness about STARTTLS and TLS but https://github.com/peterverraedt/tinylist/ (which is a fork) did eventually work after much faff and experimentation.

One day short of 13 years sterling service and Ecartis has been retired.

mr-karan
https://listmonk.app/ is pretty cool. Runs as single binary, can be easily deployed with Docker, and codebase is in modern Go + React.
zimpenfish
It does look pretty cool and single binary is perfect but it's the newsletter / marketing style of mailing list as best I could tell. If it can be used as a proper bi-directional mailing list, they need to work on their documentation and feature lists :)
ibotty
mailman 2 is not bad.
number6
How do you use a mailing list as a user? I subscribed once and it filled my mailbox and since then I didn't subscribe to one again...
ddevault
For many mailing lists, you don't have to subscribe to post. But, if you subscribe and the volume is too much, most users set up filters to direct messages from a particular mailing list into a dedicated folder on their mail server.
hestefisk
MAJORDOMO.
syntheticnature
I have fond memories, but that's looking rather like abandonware, too. Even the MJ2 rewrite, which doesn't have a release marked stable that I see, hasn't had a nightly snapshot since 2016, and the original stopped development in 2000 and doesn't run on Perl 5.
dano
I laughed at this one as I've not heard of MJD in a very long time.
betamaxthetape
I second the thought that for a lot of folks, the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own mailing list server has driven them to use commercial, hosted solutions such as groups.io.

The major disadvantage that comes with hosted solutions is that you have no control over the service. Consider Yahoo Groups, which deleted all of its mailing list archives last year. I was one of the project leads for the Archive Team effort [1] to make a copy of those groups before they were lost forever, and although we saved several hundred thousand groups, we lost a lot more. Many millions of groups just vanished. Many of them, despite being long abandoned, were basically the only evidence left of that community, containing vital archives and information that is now gone.

I'm not saying this doesn't happen with self-hosted groups, but if a self-hosted group decides to shut down, it's their choice. (Rather than Yahoo emailing you to tell you that everything will be gone in a month).

[1] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php/Yahoo!_Groups

rrix2
It could be the list admin's choice or it could be the server host's choice or it could be the choice of the hard drive in their server. More than control, long term data storage, with real time retrieval is expensive and error prone.
jidiculous
Does Google Groups do what you want?
duskwuff
I think OP is specifically looking for something they can self-host.

Besides, Google Groups is borderline abandoned. It's stuck awkwardly between being a Usenet client, a mailing list archive, and a web forum, and I don't think it's seen much interest from Google's side in a long time.

zimpenfish
And if I wasn't going to self-host, it would be as far away from Google as is possible to get because of their habit of randomly abandoning things with (relatively) little notice.
mlinksva
Opposite of current, but long ago SmartList for procmail was simple to set up and run. Curious what the closest maintained list manager might be.
m463
I think I worked with that a long time ago. From what I recall, my impression was that smartlist and procmail seemed to be written entirely in regular expressions. :)
zimpenfish
Procmail is what you get if Sendmail got beaten up in an APL bar.
kazinator
GNU mailman is more or less fine; what sucks is the pipermail archiver that it comes with. That doesn't have to be used, luckily.

Mailing lists benefit from a good web archive. For anyone who hasn't received everything in their inbox, the archive is the only interface to past material. It has to be presented well, searchable, threaded and so on, so you don't miss anything due to not having it in your inbox.

I've been using Lurker for years, with my own modifications.

http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lurker/

Some of my hcanges are cosmetic (like different icons), but the main one is to HTML in posts to be rendered. To do that, the HTML is passed through a rigid HTML cleaner that validates for allowed tags and attributes:

http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/

(That is connected to Lurker via a new Lurker config option htmlfilt which specifies to path to the hc executable).

In spite of that, when I contacted the Lurker author about this, he was vehemently dead set against HTML going into archives.

My mods to Lurker look dated, but the upstream has not moved. The SourceForge page is still offering 2.3 for download in the Files area, dated 2009.

"No HTML in mailing lists dammit" may work for some open source projects, but it's not realistic; people use HTML e-mails, and want the archive to have the content that people see who have received the e-mail directly.

hannob
> GNU mailmain is more or less fine; what sucks is the pipermail archiver that it comes with. That doesn't have to be used, luckily.

Pipermail is part of mailman 2, which is the about to be deprecated very soon version (it's python 2 only).

Mailman 3 has a different thing, but I haven't tried it yet.

syntheticnature
This is interesting, because cPanel still ships with Mailman 2 as the 2->3 archive conversion still has bugs[0].

0: https://features.cpanel.net/topic/upgrade-to-mailman-3-0

kazinator
If archive "conversion" is an issue, that sounds like the new archive tool that Mailman 3 comes with is not good at importing mbox files and generating an archive from them? That seems hard to believe.

I had no issue with this with Lurker. A few times in the (now fairly distant) past I gone in there and blew off all the generated content (after editing an mbox archive file), then re-generated.

Since then I developed an invisible delete button right in the web UI, for removing spam from the web archive. If you know where to click, and what the password is, you can blow off any post.

An archiver that can't import your historic mbox files has a showstopper issue for anyone with existing archives, and may present a problem to someone who wants to rebuild a damaged web archive.

syntheticnature
Looking at that thread, it's not clear whether the problem is the archives or moving some other configuration aspects; it seems like they think an archive-less move is easier, but given there's no support at all...
kazinator
Looks like this is HyperKitty? Any examples of this in use?

The web page has a link to some dated mock-ups (2012):

https://wiki.list.org/HyperKitty

It looks like some random web BBS forum.

(Please tell me the actual thing does not have up/down "like" votes; that's completely stupid in a mail archive (not to mention misleading), and preventing abuse of it would require visitors to be authenticated, which is also a complete stupid thing in a mail archive.)

banger180
Fedora usses mailman 3 and hyperkitty at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/

It is infidelity inspired by the layout of a forum, but looks great IMO.

kazinator
Wow, that's pretty awful. And they did implement the moronic voting buttons, too (facepalm).

Lurker wipes the floor with Hyperkitty.

(And is fast: C++ that generates static pages!)

zimpenfish
I saw something about this yesterday and the stated rationale for votes was that mailman is supposed to bridge between mailing lists and forums (where votes are useful.)
m463
> "No HTML in mailing lists dammit"

and javascript. webgl too. and phone and tablet support. And support for inline ads. We should allow zero-pixel tracking links to so we know advertising statis... I mean to protect us from covid-19. and animated avatars.

it's a slippery slope.

TimSchumann
So, to clarify after reading your posts in the thread...

You’re looking for google groups locally hosted, not mailchimp locally hosted?

savoyard
Take a look at Mlmmj [1]. I found it well documented and easy to set up.

[1] http://mlmmj.org

jcrawfordor
I'm actually rather fond of mlmmj and used it for quite a while, but I would also caution that it's not really usable at any scale without developing further tooling around it. List management is relatively primitive and you will need either tooling or manual intervention for a reasonably large number of cases. It largely barfs on HTML email (it tries to handle it but does so poorly) and so you will probably want to put something in front of it to handle that better. List creation is a painfully manual process unless you find or develop tooling to automate it (the mlmmj user community is small enough that, at least a couple of years ago, I struggled to find any tooling available and ended up writing my own shell scripts). While the code is much simpler, and perhaps because of it, the administrator experience is generally more complex, particularly around access control.
zzo38computer
I think many thing it depend what features you need. One feature I want is NNTP.

And I am not the only person who wanted NNTP for the SQLite forum; there is at least one other person too who also wants that.

allanrbo
I made this service to replace mailman in a few sports club I'm member of: https://mailgroup.io . I've let it be free for anyone who wants to use it. Took a while to get all the deliverability stuff right, and all the monitoring in place, but we've been using it successfully for about 5 years now. I know it's not self hosted as you asked for, but thought I'd put it out there anyway, just in case a hosted free service would also be an option.
captn3m0
If this is a low traffic list, I’m hosting one for free via Mailgun (which has bi-directional support). Benefit is that you get to keep it on your own domain while avoiding deliverability issues.

It doesn’t have a self subscribe thing though - look at subgun/audience. There are a few alternatives.