

Ask HN: Are there still mailing list providers? - Tomte

Searching for &quot;mailing list&quot; gets millions of hits. For <i>advertising</i> &quot;mailing lists&quot;, not the discussion kind.<p>I have found very few providers so far, but they are either prohibitively expensive for some small list with no real potential to get huge numbers of subscribers, bundled with web hosting offers and very crippled (Majordomo, mail based administration only and list name cannot be chosen freely), or very much politically affiliated.<p>I&#x27;d set up my own list server on DigitalOcean, but it seems to be overkill and I fear the hassle to make big providers accept mails from this server.<p>Do you have a suggestion for a provider? Can Mailchimp be &quot;abused&quot; to look like a discussion list?
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sjs382
"listserv provider" is the magic query term.

From a quick search, here are some options:

[https://www.simplelists.com/](https://www.simplelists.com/)

[https://www.mail-list.com/services/](https://www.mail-list.com/services/)

[http://cczen.com/](http://cczen.com/)

[http://www.nabble.com/](http://www.nabble.com/)

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jeffmould
You could do something like a private Google Group or Yahoo Groups.

Another option may be to do something with Mandrill or Sendgrid.

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Tomte
Yes, possibly, but I'm a bit partial to old-fashioned email.

Although I remember that Yahoo! was real email last time I was subscribed to a
group. Just not very convenient. Still, good idea, I forgot about Yahoo!

Google Groups also has a usability problem, but I may be cranky because I
remember the Usenet archive from about five or six degradations ago.

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smeyer
I'm in a few google groups that only get used for discussion style emails,
where nobody actually uses the web interface. I'm also on a bunch of email
lists using mailman and run through the computing society of my alma mater (as
well as some similar lists from other nearby schools.)

Is there some feature set you want that you can't get by setting up a google
group and then just using it as a discussion list in old-fashioned email?

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Tomte
Probably not, if you say so. I will give it a try. Thanks!

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tabakd
[http://librelist.com/](http://librelist.com/) seems nice.

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techhiring
I hear mailchimp will get the job done

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Tomte
Do they?

I think having a sign-up form and a list is very simple, yes, but I haven't
seen so far how to allow subscribers to post.

I _think_ it's one-to-many instead of many-to-many. Is that just my
misunderstanding of Mailchimp?

Other than that it may be a really good solution.

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akeruu
Wouldn't a simple Google Group like service fit ?

