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Like I recently wrote in response to someone here who was fascinated that mailing lists were “still a thing in 2025”: Please, inform us of an alternative which

• mxchris2121 1y ago
  Please inform me of an opensource way to run one that I can actually get configured properly.
  • teddyh 1y ago
    I’ve heard good things about <https://mailinabox.email https://mailinabox.email>.
  • giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Same for self-hosted mail...
    • mrweasel 1y ago
      I haven't tried it, so it might be more complicated than the documentation leads me to believe, but Mox looks promising: https://www.xmox.nl/ https://www.xmox.nl/
      • yogorenapan 1y ago
        I've been using it for a year now. Can vouch for the quality and reliability
    • eschaton 1y ago
      Proxmox has a mail appliance.
    • immibis 1y ago
      I use Postfix and Dovecot. Configuration was annoying, but doable. If you read mail on the server itself then you don't need Dovecot.
  • benley 1y ago
    Mailman 3 is acceptable, imho. It's been a few years since I worked with it, but I was able to design a reliable public instance of it (https://mailman.haskell.org https://mailman.haskell.org) with a few days of effort, including the migration from mailman v2.
    • Symbiote 1y ago
      Same here — I think I set Mailman 3 up in a day, although I was already familiar with setting up the mail (Postfix) part.
    • pabs3 1y ago
      Mailman 3 is horrible, which is why some folks have ported Mailman 2 to Python3. https://github.com/jaredmauch/mailman2-python3 https://github.com/jaredmauch/mailman2-python3
      • igor47 1y ago
        Lol this makes sense. I really respect the author of mailman3's dedication, but the architecture of the system is insane. There are 3 services -- the actual mail delivery piece, the admin interface, and the archiver -- all talking over various public and local interface, configuration is a nightmare, logs are all over the place, it takes over your system with scheduled cron jobs, there's some kind of built in console that I can't figure out how to use due to virtualenv issues plus cli commands that cover only some of the necessary functionality. It's gotten better since I run the tool as two docker containers, but still ends up being the most difficult service to administer and I administer quite a few
  • layer8 1y ago
    Besides GNU Mailman, there’s also Sympa [0]. It’s fairly straightforward to set those up on a VPS with Debian or similar if you’re familiar with running a Linux server. [0] https://www.sympa.community/ https://www.sympa.community/
• magicalhippo 1y ago
  Newsgroups as in NNTP[1] fits those criteria, no? Granted, federated bit is more tricky now. Back in the days many if not most ISPs ran a NNTP server. But the protocol supports it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol
  • mrweasel 1y ago
    I loved Usenet back in the day, but I sort of wonder why organisations keep their servers running. I struggle to find any active newsgroups these days. Weirdly enough spam still hits some of the groups.
    • WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
      And conspiracy chain mails still pondering on whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. I joined usenet recently to see how the things were, and it had some serious ghost town vibes.
    • magicalhippo 1y ago
      Yeah it died off sadly. Had so many good news discussions back then. Still miss the buzz of downloading a new batch of messages. I used Gmane[1] to access mailing lists as newsgroups, which I've always thought was a much better fit. Alas as with all good things that was shut down also. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane
      • clircle 1y ago
        News.gmane.io is up. I use it daily to track a few projects.
        • magicalhippo 1y ago
          Ah, thanks. I knew there were issues, but somehow missed they'd resolved it. A great service, glad to see it alive and kicking!
• adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  Discourse seems to fit the bill (although I'm not 100% sure about federation)
  • micromacrofoot 1y ago
    it seems to have a plugin for federation, but I'm not sure how federation works for forums
    • eschaton 1y ago
      It doesn’t, federation makes it not a web forum and its “web forum first” nature makes Discourse fundamentally unsuitable for things like technical work. (As opposed to, say, product support.) If you want federation, set up a mailing list gatewayed to a usenet group you host on your own NNTP server, and slap a web forum interface on top of that for the whiny children who won’t use anything that isn’t inside a browser.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • micromacrofoot 1y ago
        why is it bad for technical work? it seems like a very technical variety of forum
        • eschaton 1y ago
          It has all sorts of gamification that gets in the way, it’s easy to over-silo discussions, it has a concept of “answered” that’s not really appropriate for a lot of project level discussion, it has all sorts of other extraneous crap like “reactions,” and—most importantly—it’s fundamentally implemented as a web page that everyone involved needs visit regularly to see when there’s something new and to respond to that. Discourse would be fine if it were a front end to a mailing list and didn’t have the excess categorization and gamification crap. Instead it’s a web forum with a mailing list mode tacked on by people who never did substantial technical work using mailing lists.
• o11c 1y ago
  Literally any open-source forum or wiki meets all the requirements except possibly "federated" (depending on whether people set up a dump->restore to another machine), but is much more welcoming to ad-hoc contributors who don't want to subscribe to 10,000 emails per day just to get replies to their own posts. If mailing-list users actually used CC properly this would not be a problem, but THAT IS NOT THE REALITY WE LIVE IN. Bad technical etiquette on behalf of the habitual mailing-list users is the main reason people hate mailing lists. === Editing to also reject some of the points from the article: "1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter bullshit. If you accept "must install a mail program", surely you can accept "must install lynx or curl"? The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going to leak my email address or something? ... I don't even want to respond in detail to the rest of the nonsense that follows. Are they talking about some particular forum that hasn't been updated since 1999 or something? Yes these are problems which is why people have made solutions to them ...
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    My problem with forums is that I am forced to use a web browser and access them through their provided interface. A lot of them, especially the older ones, are seriously hard to use and even worse on mobile. Mailing lists I access with my preferred mail client and environment. Receiving "10,000 emails per day" would only happen on a very active list. In most cases you're talking about a dozen or at worst a few hundred. Your email client can easily filter those into a virtual folder, and quickly find the messages where you are addressed or threads you're interested in. Once I have the emails, I have them forever. I am not dependent on some forum remaining online five years from now if I want to go find an old message. Web forums and wikis just suck for message-based interactions. Email is designed for that and it works really well.
    • eschaton 1y ago
      I find that people who complain about email volume are not only unfamiliar with setting up rules to file messages into folders, but entirely uninterested in learning how to leverage their tools that way. In fact, it seems many of them resent having to learn anything in order to be more productive, instead insisting the burden belongs on others. “I don’t want to get all that email, so it’s OK for me to make you visit a web page several times a day to participate instead.” And no, Discourse’s “mailing list mode” isn’t sufficient, it’s as garbage as the rest of Discourse, especially when D showed the right way to do this: Mailing list primary, NNTP newsgroup gatewayed (or vice versa), with a web forum for those who insist on one. If only LLVM et al had gone that route.
• thewebguyd 1y ago
  And those are the exact same reasons I loath the trend of discourse moving into discord groups, or slack groups, hell I've even seen Facebook groups. None of those are reachable without an account and in many cases an invite (private by default), they are not indexed by search engines, they are proprietary, cannot be exported or archived, etc. It's asking for knowledge to be lost.
  • 62 1y ago
    > It's asking for knowledge to be lost. You say that like it's not already happening. It's happening. Many technical chats are only happening on discord now. Everything single day the volume of current technical knowledge gets smaller.
  • throw7 1y ago
    Yes, I was hoping to check out ladybird browser project, but they use discord.
    • pwdisswordfishz 1y ago
      There are other problems besides access. The big one being that the people that you'll find on Discord are the kinds of people that you'll find on Discord.
      • replwoacause 1y ago
        Yeah I tried to use Discord on two different occasions and each time I hated it. Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?
        • setopt 1y ago
          > Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time? I mean, it’s the same reasons people used IRC for decades, and some people were unhappy if channels saved and published the IRC logs. Informal asynchronous communication arguably has its place, and many people are more willing to speak plainly and without overthinking if what they say is not expected to be publically readable for decades. Even if, of course, in public chat rooms someone could always record and share what is said without your consent, and if most people don’t say confidential things in public chatrooms about technical topics, there’s still something about a mailing list or forum that makes me personally speak less plainly compared to ephemeral channels.
• liendolucas 1y ago
  I would probably change "Not dependent on a specific company" to "Not being hostage from ransomware from specific companies". See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887
  • kragen 1y ago
    Even without Slack's ransomware-as-a-service business model, being dependent on a specific company is a big problem. If Dropbox decides to ban your country for being running too many AI crawlers, or DejaNews goes out of business, or XOJane decides to pivot to a different market (see http://web.archive.org/web/20171015000000*/http://www.xojane.com/sex/polyamory-101 http://web.archive.org/web/20171015000000*/http://www.xojane... for example), or LiveJournal gets bought by Russian trolls, it's potentially a big problem.
• gus_massa 1y ago
  The sad reality is that for 99.99% or the population: WhatsApp groups, with a solid 1/5 in your requirement list. (Or at least, I hope they get one point, text selection is broken.) People just not care, they just want to send and recive messages and an easy method to add and remove persons.
• Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  ActivityPub? Just because people use it as a Twitter clone doesn't mean you can't run mailing list style content on top of it. It would be nice to not use Mastodon-isms if you're trying to go about doing something like that. However it's easy with Mastodon-isms too. Have a bot listen to mentions, use any sort of moderation/accept queue to accept questions, then Reblog the ones you accept. ATProto would fit most of the bill too here but AP is self-hostable and contained in a way that ATP isn't. AP is also standardized and has gone through standards bodies.
• johanyc 1y ago
  RSS?
• kilroy123 1y ago
  This is why I run a newsletter. I love the simplicity of it.
• throwaway270925 1y ago
  I sometimes wonder why there aren't any chat-based apps/UIs for mailing lists? Think UIs in the style of Discord/Slack/Teams/etc but with email/mailinglist(s) as backend. IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
  • dfc 1y ago
    I think one of the reasons is that mailing list usage expects/imposes some level of reflection time and editing between sending a new reply. Imagine if every time someone hit enter in slack/teams/discord a new email showed up in a thread somewhere in someone's mail reader.
  • rakoo 1y ago
    Deltachat is still alive and well, you can see it evolve on their blog: https://delta.chat/en/blog https://delta.chat/en/blog The thing is, deltachat really focuses on encrypted-first, and if possible encrypted-only communications in tight-knit groups: servers have no authority, they're merely relays. Mailing lists are not built for that, they're the central authority point where all moderation happens, and being forwarders they can't work with e2ee. In the current setting deltachat isn't built for mailing lists but group or 1-1 communication work very well.
  • layer8 1y ago
    Mailing lists are largely a different mode of communication than chat, as alluded to in parts of TFA. I’d go as far as to say that mailing lists are mostly incompatible with chat-like usage patterns. It’s a feature, not a bug. Chat programs and protocols like IRC have existed almost as long as mailing lists, but were never a replacement for them.
• dfabulich 1y ago
  Mailing lists aren't federated. Everyone has to email one particular address at one particular domain; whoever controls that email address + domain can censor/block emails. (That's a good thing when you're blocking spam!) If you're OK with the fact that mailing lists are somewhat centralized, there are actually got a ton of great alternatives to pure mailing lists. All popular open-source web forums support email notifications, and most of them support posting by email, (I know phpBB and Discourse do,) and all of them have sitemaps with crawlable archives.
  • dminuoso 1y ago
    You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The network of mail is very much federated. In mail we have so many freedoms. We have become so locked into technology that we have to introduce a term like “federation” to signify the interoperability and freedom of a single component. Mail is federation layered upon federation. The fact that you can just use a mailings list address as a member of another mailing list gives you even more federation possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange protocols.
    • Erwyn 1y ago
      > You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The network of mail is very much federated. While I do completely agree with that in theory (and I also love mail) I think it does not stand the reality test because of email deliveravility which tends to be a nightmare. How do you solve this? Do you use a third party SMTP?
      • Intermernet 1y ago
        I ran multiple mail servers for years until about 10 years ago (moved out of the industry). The deliverability problem, as far as I know, hasn't really changed that much in the last decade. The key was to configure DKIM, SPF, only use secure protocols and monitor the various black/block-lists to make sure you aren't on them for very long. In my experience, if you end up on a few bad lists, and don't react quickly, the reputation of your domain goes down rapidly and it's harder to get off said lists. You also want some spam filtering, which, these days, is apparently much more powerful with local LLMs. I used to just use various bayesian classification tools, but I've heard that the current state of affairs is better. Having said that, when you've trained the tool, it does a pretty good job. It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to almost zero.
• s1110 1y ago
  IRC
• renegat0x0 1y ago
  Yesterday I seen someone claiming on Reddit that they stopped using mailing list in favour of using rss
  • pasc1878 1y ago
    Yes that works to read them - and I do use that. But if you want to write a message in reply or start a new conversation - RSS does not allow that. (In the cases that I use RSS - I will just copy to my mail app - it is more cumbersome than just replying in mail (or usenet via gmane) but this is not something I do often for those lists.
• maxloh 1y ago
  Maybe Matrix?
  • rlpb 1y ago
    I think Matrix is a good upcoming contender. The available clients are not really mature yet though. Element is excessively heavyweight and bloated, being Electron based. Other clients all seem to miss some essential feature or other. And there's no good archiving solution yet.
    • Arathorn 1y ago
      Matrix has/had a great archiver at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-viewer https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-viewer - but it fell foul of the bizarre failure mode that folks who had explicitly set their rooms to be archivable had subsequently forgotten that they had, and then went absolutely berserk when they discovered their rooms having been archived: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archive https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archi.... This was one of the reasons given for libera to turn off the libera<->matrix irc bridge. At the time we had much bigger problems to deal with, so we shelved it and have yet to get back to it.
    • immibis 1y ago
      And Element are consistently just not working in various ways, different every time. For example, recently I tried to join a room address from another server and was told "can't join that because a server address wasn't specified" but another address on the same server says "room not found" so it clearly did know the server address. And there's the whole thing where you have to always be signed into at least one device at a time. If there's ever a time when you're not signed into any device, you have to reset your encryption key which means losing access to all old messages plus sending a notification to everyone you're in contact with. And I've had times when the reset button also just didn't work, throwing some error, so I was just locked out.
      • maxloh 1y ago
        > If there's ever a time when you're not signed into any device, you have to reset your encryption key, meaning you lose access to all old messages... That is a deal breaker, IMO. Encryption is great, but it shouldn't come at the price of data loss and a degraded user experience.
• RossBencina 1y ago
  Even within the realm of mailing lists I'm not sure it's as easy as it used to be to find reliable hosting.
• imcritic 1y ago
  First inform us of mail providers that match the same criteria.
  • randunel 1y ago
    All, as far as I can tell.
    • imcritic 1y ago
      Is Gmail non-propietary? Can you self host it?
      • randunel 1y ago
        You can self host an email server, what you can't self host is proprietary features on top of those, but I'm pretty sure you can find alternatives that work with said email server software you picked to self host.
• notepad0x90 1y ago
  Forums are fine. You understand I'm sure that federated is not the same as decentralized. Mailing lists are moderated, the list is hosted on a specific domain and that domain's owner can do whatever they want with the list. How is that different from a forum or some website? I don't like them but there mastodon,matrix,etc.. all open source and you can host them on a domain like you can a mailing list. They meet all your criteria. I have an additional criteria to add: Security! I would like to authenticate that someone really said what is on the mailing list or its archives. But before that, mailing lists are not as accessible as all the other options, because it all comes down to how accessible the email client is. Gmail is wildly different from mutt. Inconsistently accessible is what it is. how about privacy? I wouldn't want my email and my email's domain published to the world to communicate with the list. And again with integrity, mailing list moderators can do all sorts of stuff (and I've seen plenty of shady and downright questionable practices). How about we let things built for different times and with different requirements than what we have to day go to sleep quietly?
  • whartung 1y ago
    Mailing list delivery is centralized, but archiving is federated. How many folks have a full copy of, say, the last 1, 2, 5, 10 years of a long running mailing list? Client accessibility is up to the individual user. They can choose whatever client fits them best. I don’t know any mailing list software that signs messages as a sort of “yes, this message did travel through the mailing list” verification. Were it that important I’m sure it’s possible. But having identical messages on 1000 subscribers computers has to stand for something.
    • notepad0x90 1y ago
      If the mailing list server tampered with the message, everyone will get the false message. But if it is an encrypted group chat on matrix for example, you can 100% verify that the person posted that message (provided you've verified them, but even if you haven't, your logic of other people having verified it can be used). As for archiving, you can archive mastodon, lemmy, bluesky, matrix,etc... as you said, if it was important, it can be made so for any open platform. Public archiving services will use APIs instead of mail clients, that's the only difference which shouldn't make a difference to users. Even on the closed source platform twitter, there are public archives of things. Governments post official communication and records on there. Some governments are experimenting with Git for law publications. Nepal just voted an interim leader over discord! This nostalgic thinking about mailing lists is incompatible with a technologist's mindset.
• jjav 1y ago
  This mostly falls under "Accessible", but want to highlight how incredibly limited the UI is in every proprietary messaging platform. One is forced to interact with it in just one way and it's inevitably missing tons of functionality. With email, there can be no limits because it is an open standard. One can pick whichever MUA (email client) one prefers or trivially switch betwen multiple ones without any loss of data. But even more importantly, if one has custom needs or preferences, that is also easy. All my incoming email goes first through procmail where I can apply various filters and labels and can sort it into different folders and priorities on completely custom criteria that fits what I want.