
How I run a small discussion mailing list - pcr910303
https://adamo.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/how-i-run-a-small-discussion-mailing-list/
======
pjc50
Hmm. Seems small enough that it's probably missing a bunch of important
cases... the first one I can see is the lack of subscription confirmation. I
can't see special-casing for "<>" either. Or prevention from subscribing the
mailing list to itself.

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shutton
That’s a neat script and one of the simplest setups I’ve seen for running a
mailing list (even though I don’t understand everything the Lisp is doing).

I’m a massive fan of mailing lists and despite all the other alternatives I
think for the right group of people they’re the perfect solution.

* Here comes the shameless plug *

I’m the founder of Gaggle Mail
([https://gaggle.email/](https://gaggle.email/)) which provides dead simple
group email. Our customers are as far from the HN crowd as you can get; non-
technical, generally elderly but they’re desperate for something simple, with
few features that does just what they need - and they’re willing to pay!

There’s a real market for taking what appears as a simple technology to most
techies and dumbing it down to make it accessible to a wide and willing
market.

~~~
nicolaslem
It's a great project you have here. Just be careful with the grammar, from the
homepage: "Gaggle Mail gives your group it's/its own permanent email address".

~~~
shutton
Thanks for that, I appreciate it.

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avian
Years ago I used to run a few such small mailing lists. As far as I remember,
I used minimalist [1] and mlmmj [2] at one time, maybe others. Over time they
became major pain to maintain due to spam. Not so much in preventing spam
messages from reaching subscribers but because various broken spam botnets
were constantly hitting weird corner cases and were constantly breaking the
lists in various wondrous ways.

That was before the whole "server reputation" became a thing. I'm not touching
any kind of automated mail sending these days. I'm not giving AI any more
excuse than it already has to randomly blacklist me out of the SMTP world.

[1]
[https://github.com/madroach/minimalist](https://github.com/madroach/minimalist)
(?)

[2] [http://mlmmj.org](http://mlmmj.org)

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jlgaddis
Plug: A friend/former cow-orker has ran FreeLists for, I'm not even sure,
15-20 years now.

It's a fairly straightforward, no bullshit product if you just want a mailing
list.

~~~
tinbucket
I use Freelists for a tiny mailing list I run and I cannot recommend it highly
enough. Setup is a little strange, and some of the admin settings aren't
entirely intuitive, but when it's up and running it's excellent.

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baby
Mailing lists are the worst way to have discussion. A subreddit on the other
hand is the best alternative I found.

~~~
zozbot234
Subreddits suck, at least for focused, productive discussions you might want
to archive and refer back later. Old-school forums actually work very well for
this use case; the only thing they're missing in a present-day context is some
level of, e.g. ActivityPub interop.

~~~
Grumbledour
Yeah, where actually have forums gone? All the software seems to be pretty
outdated and you can't throw a stone without hitting someone who is building
some new link aggregator or mircoblogging service.

But where are decentralized or just modern platforms focused on discussions,
not on people?

~~~
tomcooks
> Yeah, where actually have forums gone?

"Stop necroposting! You have been warned" "You have to login to search" "You
need to wait for an administrator to confirm your account before you can
login" "You need to have a hight reputation to post" "You cannot post in this
subforum" "You haven't posted in the Newbies forum" "[missing image from
TinyPic or other 3rd party hosting]" "[missing image due to 3rd party hosting
quota limits]" "PMed you the solution"

Yea no thanks.

> But where are decentralized or just modern platforms focused on discussions,
> not on people?

Stackexchange is one example.

~~~
nkrisc
You've spent days, if not weeks searching for any lead on the obscure problem
you're facing. You might not even be certain exactly what the problem is, but
you're by now intimately familiar with its manifestation. It's clear by now
you're probably the first person in ten years menaced by it. Ancient forums
with broken CSS, archived mailing lists, dusty blogs; you scrape together
enough relevant information to finally craft the search query that will save
you, the one that will finally lead you to the result. There. It's done. The
results page consists mostly of entries with nonsense text and languages you
can't read, but at the top is your answer. You click it. Scanning the original
post it's clear you've found your salvation. You scroll through, quicker and
quicker, impatient to end it all. Almost there, to the last post. The answer
you seek. But, in a flash, it's gone.

"PMed you the solution"

~~~
skocznymroczny
More like "Nvm, I found the problem, it's working now :)"

~~~
nkrisc
An even greater betrayal.

