Best current mailing list manager?

Consider my platform: https://sourcehut.org

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

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

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.

I think it's still mailman (sorry, I'm not happy with this situation either).

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.

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

Is that what you are looking for ? https://www.sympa.org/

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.

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.

https://dadamailproject.com/

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.

coming in from other thread regarding zerodha, this caught my attention.

not sure if it fits the bill.. https://github.com/knadh/listmonk

https://listmonk.app/ is pretty cool. Runs as single binary, can be easily deployed with Docker, and codebase is in modern Go + React.

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.

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

[1] http://mlmmj.org

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...

I've had good luck with https://gaggle.email

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

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

mailman 2 is not bad.

Does Google Groups do what you want?

MAJORDOMO.