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 is:

• Non-proprietary

• Federated

• Archivable

• Accessible

• Not dependent on a specific company

— <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972038>

I set one up for our HOA as a unified conversation and notification platform. Everyone now has exactly one email address to remember to notify everyone of, say, a graduation party where there might be some extra cars. Nobody needs Facebook, or a Google account for Groups, etc. When people move, their addresses just get updated in the list.

The only trouble I had moderating it is people just love searching for whatever email was sent last to the list, necroing the thread and changing topics to whatever is on their mind. I had to set threads to auto-lock after a week or two of inactivity to force people to start new topics for things that are, well, new topics.

Via http://www.mail-archive.com/nginx@nginx.org/msg25495.html.

Sadly, it's been announced yesterday that the nginx.org mailing lists are being shutdown by end of month (Sept 2025).

P.S. Probably one more reason to look into into the freenginx fork of nginx — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373327 — their mailing lists are at http://freenginx.org/en/support.html.

I have actually argued for the use of mailing lists for corporate engineering discussions. When that becomes the medium for code review or design discussions, there's a nice streamlined workflow. Further, it's practically trivial to write or customize a mailing list reflector. If you have a decent and secure mail client library, you're a weekend away from it just working. Contrast that with customizing or rolling your own IRC, Slack, Discord, or web forum clone. Mailing lists don't suffer from vendor lock-in, and anyone with a mail client and who can follow basic rules can participate.

An invitation-only mailing list with a reflector that verifies PGP encryption and non-repudiation is just fine for most corporate discussions. For mailing lists open to the public, new users can be placed in a moderation queue for a period of time until it's clear that they understand list netiquette and formatting rules.

Some resources on mailing lists from ArchiveTeam:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Mailing_Lists

Agree these are advantages: Mailing lists are simple - Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly - Mailing lists interoperate - They're asynchronous - They're portable - They can be freely interconverted - They can be written to media and read from it

Disagree these are advantages: Mailing lists require no special software - They impose minimal security risk - They impose minimal privacy risk - They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up - They scale beautifully - they're relatively free of abuse vectors - They handle threading well

I still use mailing lists, both at work and personally, but they are 1970s technology and it feels like it. We could build mailing lists for this century that keep these advantages and fix what's broken, but there's no business model in it.

i am still of the opinion, if they would extend sieve quite a bit and standardize markdown/reST/asciidoc as rendered in emailreaders, we could probably get much more usage of mail again

(sieve would need additional features of sending/processing mails and reencrypting imho)

but mail is still less broken then mobile phone networks.

As someone who has grown up in the era of forums. I have a new found appreciation for mailing lists. I did recently come across some interesting mailing list archives from the 80s https://github.com/MITDDC/cpmarchive-1979-1984/blob/main/cpm...

I loved and love mailing lists, except for their capacity for ensuring everyone's email addresses are out there in the open for everyone else, including the scammers and spammers. I still use them (very few! and almost none of them are "tech ones"). I have a dedicated email address for them, which is disposable but doesn't look the part. I do wish, though, that many more groups would adopt mailing lists.

I had started a small cinema/lit club/group and got some good traction as well. But everyone wanted to bring in the latest group chat toys, online meet toys. I had proposed (the async) mailing list (private; I had hoped I'd find one), and it was shot down immediately, IIRC, by everyone else.

Can anyone recommend mailing list hosting for a non-public group of about 20-30 people that costs less than $100 per year?

My family plans all of their reunions via e-mail and every year we end up with someone putting an out-of-date e-mail for someone in the list, or forgetting to include someone, or including someone who has asked to not get updates. I offered to host a mailing server, and I may just end up rolling my own on a DO droplet with mailgun or something for reliable delivery because mailing list hosting I could find was rather expensive.

Mailing list yes, RSS yes....

Old, boring, simple, works.

No ads.

I digitized HOA records and initially considered using a collaboration tool like Slack partnered with Google Drive to create an online community.

Although a corporation and their hierarchy can impose tools easily, HOA communities don't have that luxury. You have broad demographics, skills and no time to support any of them.

A bigger issue is credentialing. You don't want the business of helping seniors log into or reset their Slack password.

My ultimate "non-engineering" solution was to use email for everything. A mailing list for communications. Records requests are handled via email with some automation.

There's tremendous opportunity for more email Saas -- like Sourcehut but for other disciplines.

Everyone and everything can do email. It's easy to automate, and authentication is someone else's problem (the recipient only needs access to their inbox).

The irony of talking about loving mailing list … while we’re all using a centralized, proprietary web forum (HN) to talk about it.

I’ve been running Gaggle Mail (https://gaggle.email) for over 10 years, and mailing lists are still very popular in certain circles. They’re especially valued for long-form discussions — legal groups, professional associations, HOAs, and similar communities still rely on them because they’re simple, reliable, and easy to archive.

I was trying to make a modern version of mailing lists with Booklet [1] - it just never got traction. I intend to open-source it soon. [2]

Async communications are underrated.

[1]: https://booklet.group

[2]: I did open-source my other project recently, though - so it's not an entirely hollow intention!

All this is true but mailing lists UI sucks. Please tell me how you navigate a tree of messages? It is not easy to tell who is this responding to and who responds to it. Yes, it can be figured out but why does the tree change as I navigate it? [0]

[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/7/103

I still don't know how to get started with mailing lists. Is there some server you have to join?

Mailing lists are horrible for people new to a list, as you have no history to search in your inbox and the UI to browse the archives are beyond atrocious.

People that have been on the list for decades tend to forget this, and wonder why it dies down

The only thing keeping me away from mailing lists is them being built on top of email.

how hard is it to run your own smtp gateway in 2025? are you good if you just set up dkim and such?

The value of the federated/decentralized nature of email is hard to overstate.

So many of the problems of modern technology are caused by centralization. It concentrates power and wealth into a handful of companies that now control the internet. It introduces extraordinary problems from managing data and services at global scales, which is the biggest technical challenge these companies face. It makes government surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc. It robs people of control over their data.

All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago. It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.

I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it here.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296810

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44327508

Is format=flowed too bleeding edge for those people?

Also: notification and sorting are highly configurable through rules.

I was over reading that (very well-written) explanation of the AT Protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388021

And I felt conflicted. Because it sounds great. It makes sense. But I don’t want it and now I’m wondering about what’s appealing about distributing bits of content across platforms.

This is something I can get behind. Fenced gardens.

Protocols not platforms. Email is something anyone can use without a megacorp giving permission!

>Despite that, they're still heavily used

This person is in a serious bubble. Mailing lists are not used by billions of people.

>Mailing lists require no special software

Even ignoring that most social media are accessible via a web browser instead of their dedicated app, this is just adding more complexity than having a single app for people to use. Everyday people want a single way to do things.

>Mailing lists are simple

No, you have to figure out how to configure a mail client and how to properly respond to things and is no where as user friendly as typical social media apps.

>They impose minimal security risk

Using an external service lets you outsource security to dedicated security teams as opposed to no security team or a volunteer security guy.

>They impose minimal privacy risk.

I trust the privacy of social media than some mailing list where the admin could secretly grep the contents of it with no over site.

>Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly

The average internet user is scrolling through tiktok, streaming videos. Bandwidth is not a big deal anymore.

>Mailing lists interoperate.

Social media have features for reposting between different groups. There is also copy and paste and links.

>They're asynchronous

There are social media like facebook which are also asynchronous.

>They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple outages and severe congestion

Social media is also resistant to outages and have dedicated teams towards keeping it online.

>They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.

Have you not been on social media for decades? Pushing content to the user is the norm.

>They scale beautifully.

Social media scales to billions of people using them.

>they're relatively free of abuse vectors.

You can't pretend that spam does not exist.

Mailing lists are not mainstream and they never will be. That way of operating did not resonate with people at the scale that is needed to reach even tens of millions of people. Social media works. Chat apps work. Forums can work.

I hate mailing lists, even if I recognize some of their benefits. A forum like Discourse is infinitely better in usability - to view, browse, search, follow specific threads or forums and mute the rest, do DMs, do real nested replies, embed rich media and code with proper formatting and just have a nice interface to work with. It looks like they even support ActivityPub federation recently. Although its GPL not MIT. I'm sure someone will come and tell me how all of this is doable with some janky interface or hacks on mailing lists. It's just unfortunate we have to choose. The people on mailing lists often argue vigorously for them, the rest of us are on discord/slack and have no idea they even exist and are repulsed by the usability problems. You can't convince me pasting diffs in an email thread is on par with Github/Gitlab code reviews with no downsides whatsoever.