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Email: Two use cases. With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists

Email: Two use cases. With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is happening and how to join with the ability to get all the context necessary in a chronological order? (Reading threads can get really repetitive in a mailing list, especially when trying to get up to speed on an issue.) You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat. Email is great for some things, but there's a reason people use slack instead even when they already have email.

sokoloff 8y ago
> Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?
- ebiester 8y ago
  What's the mail archive that can be set up with the same ease of use and permissions as slack? What, are you going to say hypermail? Nobody has put together a simple solution in the mail domain. Maybe there's a market for it - turns out someone might pay for it if it's better than the slack experience.
philwelch 8y ago
> You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat. This would also be acceptable IMO. Any medium that enables asynchronous long-form written communication has advantages that are fundamentally impossible for any synchronous chat medium to match. It turns out that listservs have successfully done this for decades. If there was even a fraction of the effort invested in this communication style as is invested in reinventing IRC with emoji and reaction gifs, I'm sure it would be even better.
Alex3917 8y ago
Our product https://www.fwdeveryone.com https://www.fwdeveryone.com does almost all of what you’re looking for, and will do everything within a few months. (We still need to add live updating threads, and we’re also working on an add-on so you can upload content directly from gmail.)
- ebiester 8y ago
  I like it, and that solves an interesting use case. I'd say there's a use case of assumed-private email and assumed-public email, and you're trying to solve both at the same time. What I'd want is basically this combined with a mailing list system where mailing lists could be made and ended quickly - like a slack channel, that ties to this. I hope you all do well with this!
u801e 8y ago
> With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? There's always newsgroups, which use NNTP (which isn't that dissimilar to email). They have existing groups in a hierarchy that can be subscribed to. It doesn't really give users the ability to create new newsgroups in the fly though.
- rrix2 8y ago
  Are there any resources on deploying your own internal NNTP service
  - u801e 8y ago
    The standard software package is called INN ( https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/ https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/). It should come pre-packaged in upstream repositories for various linux distributions.

sokoloff 8y ago

> Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?

ebiester 8y ago
What's the mail archive that can be set up with the same ease of use and permissions as slack? What, are you going to say hypermail? Nobody has put together a simple solution in the mail domain. Maybe there's a market for it - turns out someone might pay for it if it's better than the slack experience.

philwelch 8y ago

> You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat. This would also be acceptable IMO. Any medium that enables asynchronous long-form written communication has advantages that are fundamentally impossible for any synchronous chat medium to match. It turns out that listservs have successfully done this for decades. If there was even a fraction of the effort invested in this communication style as is invested in reinventing IRC with emoji and reaction gifs, I'm sure it would be even better.

Alex3917 8y ago

Our product https://www.fwdeveryone.com https://www.fwdeveryone.com does almost all of what you’re looking for, and will do everything within a few months. (We still need to add live updating threads, and we’re also working on an add-on so you can upload content directly from gmail.)

ebiester 8y ago
I like it, and that solves an interesting use case. I'd say there's a use case of assumed-private email and assumed-public email, and you're trying to solve both at the same time. What I'd want is basically this combined with a mailing list system where mailing lists could be made and ended quickly - like a slack channel, that ties to this. I hope you all do well with this!

u801e 8y ago

> With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? There's always newsgroups, which use NNTP (which isn't that dissimilar to email). They have existing groups in a hierarchy that can be subscribed to. It doesn't really give users the ability to create new newsgroups in the fly though.

rrix2 8y ago
Are there any resources on deploying your own internal NNTP service
- u801e 8y ago
  The standard software package is called INN ( https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/ https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/). It should come pre-packaged in upstream repositories for various linux distributions.