
Ask HN: Best current mailing list manager? - zimpenfish
Of the mailman, ecartis, etc. genre; not the newsletter marketing mass shot genre.<p>Ecartis has done sterling work for years but even back then it was effectively abandonware. Something nice and simple I can run in Docker or a single binary would be perfect.
======
ddevault
Consider my platform: [https://sourcehut.org](https://sourcehut.org)

Example list: [https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-
dev](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev)

~~~
zimpenfish
It looks really good but I'm really after something small for private mailing
lists entirely under my control - a standalone lists.sr.hut might work but (at
least) 4 daemons _and_ Celery (I already have Redis) is many moving parts.

~~~
ddevault
Well, the daemons would be postfix, listssrht-lmtp, listssrht-process, the
website, and something like nginx, plus postgresql and redis - so more like 7
:) but it's pretty easy to set up, and there are good reasons for these things
being separate processes. The LMTP daemon is separate from process, so you can
quickly accept mail and then take your time forwarding, or scale out mail
forwarding to several processes/machines for large lists. This is separate
from the web app so that they don't clog each other up and can be
deployed/scaled separately.

For standalone installations you can also set up aliases like
foobar@lists.example.org rather than ~username/foobar@lists.example.org.

Docs if you decide to give it a shot:

[https://man.sr.ht/installation.md](https://man.sr.ht/installation.md)

~~~
zimpenfish
If I can't figure out how to hack around these problems in the Ecartis source
code before I go mad, lists.sr.ht is definitely going to get its chance.

~~~
ddevault
Oh, check this out too:

[https://github.com/eXeC64/nanolist](https://github.com/eXeC64/nanolist)

~~~
zimpenfish
That didn't work due to what I think is exim's weirdness about STARTTLS and
TLS but
[https://github.com/peterverraedt/tinylist/](https://github.com/peterverraedt/tinylist/)
(which is a fork) did eventually work after much faff and experimentation.

One day short of 13 years sterling service and Ecartis has been retired.

------
betamaxthetape
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](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php/Yahoo!_Groups)

~~~
rrix2
It could be the list admin's choice or it could be the server host's choice or
it could be the choice of the hard drive in their server. More than control,
long term data storage, with real time retrieval is expensive and error prone.

------
kazinator
GNU mailmain 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/](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/](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.

~~~
hannob
> GNU mailmain is more or less fine; what sucks is the pipermail archiver that
> it comes with. That doesn't have to be used, luckily.

Pipermail is part of mailman 2, which is the about to be deprecated very soon
version (it's python 2 only).

Mailman 3 has a different thing, but I haven't tried it yet.

~~~
kazinator
Looks like this is HyperKitty? Any examples of this in use?

The web page has a link to some dated mock-ups (2012):

[https://wiki.list.org/HyperKitty](https://wiki.list.org/HyperKitty)

It looks like some random web BBS forum.

(Please tell me the actual thing does not have up/down "like" votes; that's
completely stupid in a mail archive (not to mention misleading), and
preventing abuse of it would require visitors to be authenticated, which is
also a complete stupid thing in a mail archive.)

~~~
banger180
Fedora usses mailman 3 and hyperkitty at
[https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/](https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/)

It is infidelity inspired by the layout of a forum, but looks great IMO.

~~~
kazinator
Wow, that's pretty awful. And they did implement the moronic voting buttons,
too (facepalm).

Lurker wipes the floor with Hyperkitty.

(And is fast: C++ that generates static pages!)

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

~~~
gtf21
I set up a private mailman instance last year [1] and I found the experience
_extremely_ painful.

[1]:
[https://www.gtf.io/projects/personal_infrastructure/#mailing...](https://www.gtf.io/projects/personal_infrastructure/#mailing-
lists)

~~~
zimpenfish
Thankfully I already have all the mail infrastructure set up but yeah, reading
the mailman Docker instructions is painful.

------
geocrasher
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.

~~~
zimpenfish
I fear that a return to Mailman may well be on the cards. Irksome!

~~~
zimpenfish
Thankfully saved by tinylist[1] which is not quite as tiny as nanolist[2] but
has the advantage of working and being relatively easy to tinker with for my
own purposes.

[1]
[https://github.com/peterverraedt/tinylist](https://github.com/peterverraedt/tinylist)
[2] [https://github.com/eXeC64/nanolist](https://github.com/eXeC64/nanolist)

------
adamfeldman
I believe Discourse can be used as a mailing list manager:
[https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-email-mailing-
list...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-email-mailing-lists/54298),
[https://github.com/discourse/discourse](https://github.com/discourse/discourse)

~~~
zimpenfish
Looks interesting but as with the sr.hut stuff, Rails + Ember + Postgres +
Redis is too much for a mailing list.

~~~
lowwave
Take a look at Mailcast:

[https://github.com/nodemailer/mailcast](https://github.com/nodemailer/mailcast)

Requirements: Nodejs v8+ Redis MongoDB Unblocked port 25

~~~
zimpenfish
Alas, that too is the newsletter / marketing style of mailing list.

------
Swisstone
Is that what you are looking for ?
[https://www.sympa.org/](https://www.sympa.org/)

------
allanrbo
I made this service to replace mailman in a few sports club I'm member of:
[https://mailgroup.io](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.

------
mlinksva
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.

~~~
m463
I think I worked with that a long time ago. From what I recall, my impression
was that smartlist and procmail seemed to be written entirely in regular
expressions. :)

~~~
zimpenfish
Procmail is what you get if Sendmail got beaten up in an APL bar.

------
flamey
[https://dadamailproject.com/](https://dadamailproject.com/)

~~~
duskwuff
Dadamail is a distribution mailing list manager, not a discussion mailing list
manager.

------
captn3m0
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.

~~~
kehers
+1 for Mailgun.

------
mr-karan
[https://listmonk.app/](https://listmonk.app/) is pretty cool. Runs as single
binary, can be easily deployed with Docker, and codebase is in modern Go +
React.

~~~
zimpenfish
It does look pretty cool and single binary is perfect but it's the newsletter
/ marketing style of mailing list as best I could tell. If it can be used as a
proper bi-directional mailing list, they need to work on their documentation
and feature lists :)

------
zzo38computer
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.

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

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

~~~
jcrawfordor
I'm actually rather fond of mlmmj and used it for quite a while, but I would
also caution that it's not really usable at any scale without developing
further tooling around it. List management is relatively primitive and you
will need either tooling or manual intervention for a reasonably large number
of cases. It largely barfs on HTML email (it tries to handle it but does so
poorly) and so you will probably want to put something in front of it to
handle that better. List creation is a painfully manual process unless you
find or develop tooling to automate it (the mlmmj user community is small
enough that, at least a couple of years ago, I struggled to find any tooling
available and ended up writing my own shell scripts). While the code is much
simpler, and perhaps because of it, the administrator experience is generally
more complex, particularly around access control.

------
number6
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...

~~~
ddevault
For many mailing lists, you don't have to subscribe to post. But, if you
subscribe and the volume is too much, most users set up filters to direct
messages from a particular mailing list into a dedicated folder on their mail
server.

------
marklyon
I've had good luck with [https://gaggle.email](https://gaggle.email)

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

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

~~~
zimpenfish
Yeah, that's the thing.

------
ibotty
mailman 2 is not bad.

------
jidiculous
Does Google Groups do what you want?

~~~
duskwuff
I think OP is specifically looking for something they can self-host.

Besides, Google Groups is borderline abandoned. It's stuck awkwardly between
being a Usenet client, a mailing list archive, and a web forum, and I don't
think it's seen much interest from Google's side in a long time.

~~~
zimpenfish
And if I wasn't going to self-host, it would be as far away from Google as is
possible to get because of their habit of randomly abandoning things with
(relatively) little notice.

------
totaldude87
coming in from other thread regarding zerodha, this caught my attention.

not sure if it fits the bill..
[https://github.com/knadh/listmonk](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk)

------
hestefisk
MAJORDOMO.

~~~
syntheticnature
I have fond memories, but that's looking rather like abandonware, too. Even
the MJ2 rewrite, which doesn't have a release marked stable that I see, hasn't
had a nightly snapshot since 2016, and the original stopped development in
2000 and doesn't run on Perl 5.

