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Ask HN: Best current mailing list manager?

84 points| zimpenfish | 5 years ago | reply

Of the mailman, ecartis, etc. genre; not the newsletter marketing mass shot genre.

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.

61 comments

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[+] betamaxthetape|5 years ago|reply
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

[+] rrix2|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
GNU mailman 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/

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/

(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|5 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] m463|5 years ago|reply
> "No HTML in mailing lists dammit"

and javascript. webgl too. and phone and tablet support. And support for inline ads. We should allow zero-pixel tracking links to so we know advertising statis... I mean to protect us from covid-19. and animated avatars.

it's a slippery slope.

[+] geocrasher|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
I fear that a return to Mailman may well be on the cards. Irksome!
[+] adamfeldman|5 years ago|reply
I believe Discourse can be used as a mailing list manager: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-email-mailing-list..., https://github.com/discourse/discourse
[+] generalpass|5 years ago|reply
Even before Discourse I recall forum software that managed mailing lists. There was usually a sticky with a message warning forum users that each post is sent out as an email, so be respectful of this and format accordingly should you desire a response.

EDIT:

I actually don't know if it was forum software or just mailman plugged into the forum somehow.

[+] sam_goody|5 years ago|reply
I tried using Discourse for a while.

The setup was not so bad.

But it really failed as a mailing list, as there was no way to respond to the sender without responding to all. There was a plugin that caused more issues than it solved.

It has been several months, not sure if it improved since then.

[+] zimpenfish|5 years ago|reply
Looks interesting but as with the sr.hut stuff, Rails + Ember + Postgres + Redis is too much for a mailing list.
[+] allanrbo|5 years ago|reply
I made this service to replace mailman in a few sports club I'm member of: 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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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. :)
[+] captn3m0|5 years ago|reply
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.

[+] mr-karan|5 years ago|reply
https://listmonk.app/ is pretty cool. Runs as single binary, can be easily deployed with Docker, and codebase is in modern Go + React.
[+] zimpenfish|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
Take a look at Mlmmj [1]. I found it well documented and easy to set up.

[1] http://mlmmj.org

[+] jcrawfordor|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] TimSchumann|5 years ago|reply
So, to clarify after reading your posts in the thread...

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

[+] ibotty|5 years ago|reply
mailman 2 is not bad.
[+] jidiculous|5 years ago|reply
Does Google Groups do what you want?
[+] duskwuff|5 years ago|reply
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.