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.
i 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.
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.
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:
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 :))
[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
:]
just my 0.02€
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.
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.
I settled on https://gaggle.email/
It is not the most fully featured, there is one that allowed to tag discussions that seemed very appealing, but out of budget.
The other ones I found are: - https://www.emaildodo.com/ - https://mail-list.com/ - https://www.simplelists.com/ - https://groups.io/
I opted out of self hosting for this because i don't want to deal with emails myself
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.
Your biggest hurdle will be email deliverability.
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.
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.
Works fine and zero hassle. I think it's fine for the kind of mailing lists you describe.
(No association)
As someone born before the cola wars, the title of this thread was very misleading.
They’re free mailing lists.
* 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...