7 ms·

How I run a small discussion mailing list

68 points by pcr910303 7y ago

shutton 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Thanks for that, I appreciate it.
- twic 7y ago
  Oho! I could really do with a host for a small mailing list to help manage a meetup. May i be so bold as to ask how the sustainability of this business looks? How likely do you think it is it will still be around a year from now?
  - shutton 7y ago
    I’d say pretty sustainable - but I’m biased! We’re bootstrapped and have been profitable from day one. We’ve been around for just over 4 years and have about 1500 paying customers.
baby 7y ago
Mailing lists are the worst way to have discussion. A subreddit on the other hand is the best alternative I found.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 All the software seems to be pretty outdated and you can't throw a stone without hitting someone who is building some new link aggregator or mircoblogging service.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?
    - jtbayly 7y ago
      Discourse is amazing modern open source forum software. Check it out. https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/ (homepage) https://meta.discourse.org/ https://meta.discourse.org/ (Software in use)
      - ashkankiani 7y ago
        I wouldn't call it amazing, but it is fine. It's bloated on the frontend side of things, imo.
        zozbot234 7y ago
        Way too bloated, if you ask me. Just give me a sane reimplementation of phpBB (i.e. not actually using PHP!) with the addition of interop with the Fediverse, custom clients etc. It would work a lot more smoothly and be more visually attractive as well.
pjc50 7y ago
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.
Chico11Kidlet 7y ago
Why do you need to use docker? Couldn't you use systemd or something?
jlgaddis 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
avian 7y ago
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

68 points by pcr910303 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Thanks for that, I appreciate it.
twic 7y ago
Oho! I could really do with a host for a small mailing list to help manage a meetup. May i be so bold as to ask how the sustainability of this business looks? How likely do you think it is it will still be around a year from now?
- shutton 7y ago
  I’d say pretty sustainable - but I’m biased! We’re bootstrapped and have been profitable from day one. We’ve been around for just over 4 years and have about 1500 paying customers.

baby 7y ago

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

zozbot234 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    Discourse is amazing modern open source forum software. Check it out. https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/ (homepage) https://meta.discourse.org/ https://meta.discourse.org/ (Software in use)
    - ashkankiani 7y ago
      I wouldn't call it amazing, but it is fine. It's bloated on the frontend side of things, imo.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        Way too bloated, if you ask me. Just give me a sane reimplementation of phpBB (i.e. not actually using PHP!) with the addition of interop with the Fediverse, custom clients etc. It would work a lot more smoothly and be more visually attractive as well.

pjc50 7y ago

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.

Chico11Kidlet 7y ago

Why do you need to use docker? Couldn't you use systemd or something?

jlgaddis 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

avian 7y ago

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