Ask HN: How to run an old-school mailing list?
I am considering starting one with a select few to talk about software and our side projects, to brainstorm and talk shop, without the urgency of chats like Discord or IRC, and with much less friction than a regular forum. I find I have no patience for these, while email is king and doesn't demand immediate attention.
My questions are:
- how hard is it to run a classic mailing list? How to deal with spammers, etc?
- is there any kind of good mailing list cloud service? Or is running it on my own VPS the best approach?
- is GNU Mailman still the gold standard? Is there something more modern?
Also, in case this idea of a mailing list to talk and brainstorm with fellow programmers sounds interesting to you, send me an email. I don't want this to be a huge thing, but just a place to share cool code, ideas and discussion with a small group of people, with no urgency and at our own leisure.
61 comments
[ 10.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadi don't want to be on a mailing list for a bunch of random unrelated people who don't know each other and have no reason to be civil to each other. mailing lists for shared projects make sense, and mailing lists for people who otherwise are somehow engaged in community. a mailing list for random people sharing cool ideas honestly sounds it will either totally die, or will first become really controversial and THEN totally die. even in my social circle, some of the mailing lists i ran were torn apart by politics and people splintered off to start their own mailing lists without the people with "problematic" opinions, only to learn that the "problematic" opinions were what fueled the whole shebang.
My naive hope is that a mailing list with 10 strangers will not devolve into utter chaos immediately. It might fade into irrelevance, sure, but that is just how entropy works.
feel free to ping me if you want more technical tips, or if you want to use my mailman instance instead of trying to shave that particular hairy yak.
Of course. If you're the BOFH of the whole thing, you don't even need to get anyone else's approval.
But if you do want the community to weigh in on who's "stupid" and who's not, then suddenly you might discover that three out of your ten members actually think that the person in question is a genius and is holding the whole thing together. Four members might think that booting anyone out at all runs counter to the purpose of your mailing list. Two people will privately email you and the "stupid" person, trying to somehow play both sides for no reason you can comprehend. One person will say that if anyone gets kicked out, they'll leave two.
And all those numbers may overlap!
Moderation is hard.
Moderation is easy. Moderating without hurting the feelings of anonymous strangers is hard.
Then your life becomes easy, because your mailing list becomes empty.
Given that Mailman 2's code was heavily written with Python 2.x in mind, and Python 2 was officially deprecated, I kind of understand why the maintainers felt it would be easier to rewrite things from scratch… but I think Mailman 3 suffered from a form of second-system effect [1] as it seems way more complicated than MM2.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Your biggest hurdle will be email deliverability.
* Spam isn't really a problem if you only allow members to send mails to the list
* Moderation effort really depends on the size. If you have 10 or maybe 20 well-behaving members, no moderation effort at all. If you 2k people getting into vim-vs-emacs flamewars, good luck...
See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Community_forum
Talk about discourse for OpenStreetMap: https://www.youtube.com/live/VkZJd-4C1Ws
Your claim that it's superior needs to clarify exactly what is superior about it.
E-mail, on the other hand, is a constant. I can snooze it, read it on Emacs, file it with custom rules, deal with it however I want. It doesn't require any particular app, any particular form of formatting, it doesn't give me points, badges, weekly recap emails, or require me to upload an avatar.
I feel mailing lists are underrated, and reading from this thread, it's mostly because the software to run them is as intuitive as Sendmail.
They’re free mailing lists.
Is it actually possible to sign up with a non-Gmail account? Because I've tried on a couple of lists, and it never seems to work.
I'm in a number of amateur radio and computing groups there, and it works well.
From the creator: "I’ve started three companies. I started ONElist, an email groups service, in 1997, and it was acquired by Yahoo in 2000 (where it was renamed Yahoo Groups). I started Bloglines, an online RSS aggregator before Google Reader was a thing, in 2003, and it was acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2005. I started Groups.io, an email groups service, in 2014, and I still run it." - https://www.wingedpig.com/about/
(No association)
fwiw ... personally i still use GNU mailman - but version 2, not the more current version 3.
why!? idk, version 3 seems unnecessary "bloated" in comparison to the older and "somewhat" easier-to-use version 2.
but for a new setup, i would definitely go for example with mlmmj - i'm even considering migration to it from my aging mailman2 setup :))
* http://mlmmj.org/
[disclaimer: i've used djbs ezmlm back in the days ... and i'm still a big fan of his software / approach to software.
but over the years keeping it running / maintaining it was a bit annoying, so i switched
* https://cr.yp.to/ezmlm.html
:]
just my 0.02€
I agree that ezmlm was the high point of mailing list software. :)
mlmmj looks like a properly-conceived modern option to consider though!
Haven't tried it yet.
I remember a time, not that long ago, where I regularly got mails from mailman telling me my current password.
Of course, people should never reuse their passwords anywhere, but people still do. Back then I looked into the topic and getting mailman to encrypt passwords wasn't simply changing a setting.
Works fine and zero hassle. I think it's fine for the kind of mailing lists you describe.
So you cannot easily have a mailing list, where 5 friends can email list@b.com, and each receives a copy. It'll just bounce. And worse, you'll get downgraded at the big boys, and then your other mail will bounce too.
But to your questions:
It is not hard to run a mailing list, if you know how to run a mail server, and are familiar with text based config files. Running the mail server and sorting out DKIM SPF DMARC will probably take some research. Dealing with RBLs etc is annoying but can be accomplished if you're on a netblock with a good history. You probably are not though.
Spam is not an issue, if your membership is invited, approved, or moderated.
Mailman is "fine". Set it up once and it works forever. Getting it set up is a fair bit of work, the first time. Mailing lists end up being fairly complicated things, and -- at least as of the last list I ran on Mailman -- these things are not optimized for operator experience.
For a very small and manually curated membership, you could just use an alias on your mail server. Mailing list software just automates sub/unsub actions, digest, archives, etc. You might not need any of that.
These options are either fun projects, or they are headaches, depending on your goals. If the latter, it's infinitely easier to set up Google Groups. When I shut down the last mailing lists on my servers, most of them transitioned to GG and there have been no complaints from the new operators (who were neophytes).
All the usual caveats about Google apply of course. Most people don't care.
https://simonandrews.ca/articles/how-to-set-up-spf-dkim-dmar... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39712634
It honestly isn't that bad, but it falls into that kind of thing you do once a year and then forget in between. Don't let that stuff discourage you, you'll have much bigger problems with humanity on a mailing list unless you commit to really keeping on top of the community.
We stole their term, and they're stealing it back. Seems fair.
I don't have an OED subscription, but in the free fact sheet, they note "OED's earliest evidence for mailing list is from 1898, in Overland Monthly."
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/mailing-list_n?tab=factsheet
Technically it's very easy. Some lessons learned:
- Configure it so when someone replies to a message, it's sent by default to the list. Some think it's better to reply to the person that sent the message you're responding to, but that's terrible: a lot of messages get sent privately when that wasn't the intention.
- Resist to the temptation of moderation. You'll become a slave.
- No messages accepted except from subscribers.
- If at all possible, avoid automatic subscription. Force people to write to you and acknowledge that there's a person maintaining the list and that there are rules. Write down the rules, publish them and sent them in a private message to every new subscriber.
- Have a web page for the list, bonus points for a private file-exchange space.
The worst part is people. Some of them are a piece of work. If a few dozens are reunited, you're guarranteed to have some guy that doesn't want to be your friend. As soon as you notice someone is overly confrontational with you, just drop the conversation with a closing "maybe you're right, there are several ways to look at it" and limit yourself to a referee role. If the discussion of this person with others gets too hot, then have some rule to stop it. The silent majority wants a calm conversation, so be confident that they will support you.
LPSF (https://forum.lpsf.org) migrated to it when Yahoo Groups was discontinued.
Some of the advantages are that it's open source, self-hostable, and can be configured to work as both a traditional mailing list and modern forum.
But I have half a mind to develop a Django-based system specifically for non-profit member management, build a postgres view on top of the Django tables and and have a postfix mail server reference that postgres view for mailing list delivery. I would use Mailgun or another SMTP relay to minimize deliverability issues.
It's the same software used by the official Linux Kernel Mailing Lists: https://lore.kernel.org/
- It lets people `git clone` the archives and then `git pull` from them incrementally, so you get the same "distributed backups" that git provides.
- It also provides high-quality (Xapian) fulltext search, RSS/Atom, and NNTP access.
- It doesn't artificially fracture mailing list threads at month boundaries. I know this sounds like a trivial feature, but I'm constantly astonished that most other mailing list archive software does this. It's so irritating.
- Most important of all, it provides a smooth migration path away from SMTP-push for mailing lists, which has always been the big headache. Most of the problems with email go away when you switch from push to incremental-pull. Unsurprisingly, git is the perfect tool for doing incremental pull.
My project is by no means ready for production but people interested to contribute are always welcome:
https://github.com/meli/mailpot
Dogfooded mailing lists and archives:
https://lists.meli-email.org/
As someone born before the cola wars, the title of this thread was very misleading.