4 ms·

It's unfortunate there aren't many good hosted mailing list services out there. Google Groups makes it hard to use without a google id, and mailman is tricky to

by Touche 11y ago

It's unfortunate there aren't many good hosted mailing list services out there. Google Groups makes it hard to use without a google id, and mailman is tricky to setup/maintain.

aDevilInMe 11y ago
Have a look at freelists www.freelists.org/
- tomswartz07 11y ago
  I love their Terms of Service: > I have read and agree to the above terms , and agree that if I ask FreeLists for email addresses or send SPAM using their resources, they have permission to inflict severe pain on me with large, blunt objects. [emphasis mine]
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Oh that brings to mind the old User Friendly comic attitude. We really need more of that these days.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  FreeLists is a great, "no bullshit" service. It's ran by a geek friend/ex-co-worker of mine. The only "caveat" is that everything must be public (i.e. no private/closed lists).
scrollaway 11y ago
I wish Github would get into that business. Easily set up MLs for organizations/projects and integrate them, do what they do in regular issues (markdown processing, autolinking issues etc). In fact, I wish anyone would do that. I've had detailed plans of what a service like that would look like for over two years, and no time to take a stab at it myself. If someone here is actually interested, feel free to contact me.
- hasenj 11y ago
  And it seems like an easy enough project to make. Everyone wants to jump in on the blog-engine space and invent their own blog engine (I'm guilty of this myself). We need more people to jump in on the mailing-list/forum type products.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Let's not make it appear easier than it really is. Email is hard. Mailing lists are even harder. There's a lot of non-obvious things you have to know about email before you even start to tackle things like these and on top of it you have to handle spam, registration/security, moderation, etc. It's a lot of hard, dirty problems. But like a lot of successful people will tell you, if you want to be successful too, solve the dirty problems.
    - brandmeyer 11y ago
      Why does it have to be a mailing list? Can a software project communicate with an interface platform more like HN/Reddit? For that matter, could you use a subreddit for the purpose without obviously violating Reddit's TOS?
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        Some do. It depends on the nature of the development. Mailing lists are a very popular format. One of the other projects I manage communicates near-exclusively through IRC. But good mailing lists have the main feature of topic-centered discussion, usable with just an email address (very low barrier of entry, easy to add new people to the conversation, easy to continue a topic in private). Voting isn't generally a feature you want for discussions - voting provides visibility over a short period of time, and then the topic dies off, which is a very big issue with reddit-likes being used for discussion. Newcomers to a highly popular topic are on equal footing with the rest of the participants, while on Reddit/HN the topic is overwhelmed and only the highly popular, old comments get visibility. This is very suitable if you don't want everyone to have equal footing. For example, discussions centered around video games, politics, social issues, etc. For open source it tends to be bad. This is an off-topic meta-discussion I'd love to take further, in private, if only it'd take me a click to do so. :)
themartorana 11y ago
Full disclosure, I know one of the owners, and it's a SaaS, not exactly free, but we've been using Group Buzz: http://groupbuzz.io/ http://groupbuzz.io/ It was originally built for sizable coworking communities but is pretty decent. Mail integrated, daily digests, etc. Still a WIP but pretty mature at this point.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Zero screenshots or anything of the kind. When I want a demo, I don't want to take extra steps just to be able to look at that demo, I just want to take a look right now. Those prices are really high too for what it presents itself doing. And I don't care about all the people talking about how awesome it is, really I don't. Show me the sausage. If this project wants to go anywhere it's going to have to severely review its strategy.
- glass- 11y ago
  Based on the pricing it doesn't look like this is aiming to be a replacement for mailman or majordomo public mailing lists, but more for internal private lists. 150 members before you're in the "if you have to ask you can't afford it" bracket -- even small, niche projects would have more people than that subscribed to the announce list -- and that's $129/month. You could run a majordomo list with no member limits on a VPS for less than $10/month.
themartorana 11y ago
Full disclosure, I know one of the owners, and it's a SaaS, not exactly free, but we've been using Group Buzz: http://groupbuzz.io/ http://groupbuzz.io/ It was originally built for sizable coworking communities but is pretty decent. Mail integrated, daily digests, etc. Still a WIP but pretty mature at this point.
xioxox 11y ago
If your project uses GPL-compatible licenses, then you can use gna.org [1]. Unfortunately the website is a bit old fashioned and git isn't supported for version control, but it's fine for web and mail hosting for Free software. [1] http://gna.org/ http://gna.org/
pquerna 11y ago
I've been using https://groups.io/ https://groups.io/ for a few small things, feels much better than Google Groups.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  That looks quite nice - thanks for the link
lloydde 11y ago
> google groups Then there is the spam. Once targeted the spam can get really bad. Meteor JS suffered this and moved to the open source forum software http://www.discourse.org http://www.discourse.org.
grayclhn 11y ago
I haven't used it for anything serious, but librelist looks promising: http://librelist.com/ http://librelist.com/
david-given 11y ago
I have a bunch of minor projects on SF, which I'm now going to look into moving, and yes, migrating the mailing list is the hard part. Project hosting on my own server is easy; mailing list hosting is not. (I used to run my own mailing lists. Never, ever, again.) One option is to migrate away from mailing lists and towards something like a forum; but forums, while they provide very low barrier-to-entry, produce a fundamentally terrible user experience. (Yes, including HN. This text box I'm typing into is an embarrassment.) What I'd really like, I suppose, is a service which provides an easy-to-use web forum with an SMTP gateway for those people who hate forums. And then have it all hosted via my project website so that I don't have to redirect people to some dubious third pary site. Bet I'm not going to find one, though...

by Touche 11y ago

It's unfortunate there aren't many good hosted mailing list services out there. Google Groups makes it hard to use without a google id, and mailman is tricky to setup/maintain.

aDevilInMe 11y ago

Have a look at freelists www.freelists.org/

tomswartz07 11y ago
I love their Terms of Service: > I have read and agree to the above terms , and agree that if I ask FreeLists for email addresses or send SPAM using their resources, they have permission to inflict severe pain on me with large, blunt objects. [emphasis mine]
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Oh that brings to mind the old User Friendly comic attitude. We really need more of that these days.
jlgaddis 11y ago
FreeLists is a great, "no bullshit" service. It's ran by a geek friend/ex-co-worker of mine. The only "caveat" is that everything must be public (i.e. no private/closed lists).

scrollaway 11y ago

I wish Github would get into that business. Easily set up MLs for organizations/projects and integrate them, do what they do in regular issues (markdown processing, autolinking issues etc). In fact, I wish anyone would do that. I've had detailed plans of what a service like that would look like for over two years, and no time to take a stab at it myself. If someone here is actually interested, feel free to contact me.

hasenj 11y ago
And it seems like an easy enough project to make. Everyone wants to jump in on the blog-engine space and invent their own blog engine (I'm guilty of this myself). We need more people to jump in on the mailing-list/forum type products.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Let's not make it appear easier than it really is. Email is hard. Mailing lists are even harder. There's a lot of non-obvious things you have to know about email before you even start to tackle things like these and on top of it you have to handle spam, registration/security, moderation, etc. It's a lot of hard, dirty problems. But like a lot of successful people will tell you, if you want to be successful too, solve the dirty problems.
  - brandmeyer 11y ago
    Why does it have to be a mailing list? Can a software project communicate with an interface platform more like HN/Reddit? For that matter, could you use a subreddit for the purpose without obviously violating Reddit's TOS?
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      Some do. It depends on the nature of the development. Mailing lists are a very popular format. One of the other projects I manage communicates near-exclusively through IRC. But good mailing lists have the main feature of topic-centered discussion, usable with just an email address (very low barrier of entry, easy to add new people to the conversation, easy to continue a topic in private). Voting isn't generally a feature you want for discussions - voting provides visibility over a short period of time, and then the topic dies off, which is a very big issue with reddit-likes being used for discussion. Newcomers to a highly popular topic are on equal footing with the rest of the participants, while on Reddit/HN the topic is overwhelmed and only the highly popular, old comments get visibility. This is very suitable if you don't want everyone to have equal footing. For example, discussions centered around video games, politics, social issues, etc. For open source it tends to be bad. This is an off-topic meta-discussion I'd love to take further, in private, if only it'd take me a click to do so. :)

themartorana 11y ago

Full disclosure, I know one of the owners, and it's a SaaS, not exactly free, but we've been using Group Buzz: http://groupbuzz.io/ http://groupbuzz.io/ It was originally built for sizable coworking communities but is pretty decent. Mail integrated, daily digests, etc. Still a WIP but pretty mature at this point.

scrollaway 11y ago
Zero screenshots or anything of the kind. When I want a demo, I don't want to take extra steps just to be able to look at that demo, I just want to take a look right now. Those prices are really high too for what it presents itself doing. And I don't care about all the people talking about how awesome it is, really I don't. Show me the sausage. If this project wants to go anywhere it's going to have to severely review its strategy.
glass- 11y ago
Based on the pricing it doesn't look like this is aiming to be a replacement for mailman or majordomo public mailing lists, but more for internal private lists. 150 members before you're in the "if you have to ask you can't afford it" bracket -- even small, niche projects would have more people than that subscribed to the announce list -- and that's $129/month. You could run a majordomo list with no member limits on a VPS for less than $10/month.

themartorana 11y ago

xioxox 11y ago

If your project uses GPL-compatible licenses, then you can use gna.org [1]. Unfortunately the website is a bit old fashioned and git isn't supported for version control, but it's fine for web and mail hosting for Free software. [1] http://gna.org/ http://gna.org/

pquerna 11y ago

I've been using https://groups.io/ https://groups.io/ for a few small things, feels much better than Google Groups.

mrmondo 11y ago
That looks quite nice - thanks for the link

lloydde 11y ago

> google groups Then there is the spam. Once targeted the spam can get really bad. Meteor JS suffered this and moved to the open source forum software http://www.discourse.org http://www.discourse.org.

grayclhn 11y ago

I haven't used it for anything serious, but librelist looks promising: http://librelist.com/ http://librelist.com/

david-given 11y ago

I have a bunch of minor projects on SF, which I'm now going to look into moving, and yes, migrating the mailing list is the hard part. Project hosting on my own server is easy; mailing list hosting is not. (I used to run my own mailing lists. Never, ever, again.) One option is to migrate away from mailing lists and towards something like a forum; but forums, while they provide very low barrier-to-entry, produce a fundamentally terrible user experience. (Yes, including HN. This text box I'm typing into is an embarrassment.) What I'd really like, I suppose, is a service which provides an easy-to-use web forum with an SMTP gateway for those people who hate forums. And then have it all hosted via my project website so that I don't have to redirect people to some dubious third pary site. Bet I'm not going to find one, though...