Ask HN: Mailing list providers with global deliverability?
20 comments
It might help to detail what is wrong with the current mail list stuff. The requirements are not clear here.
Circle.so can be a good alternative I think.
They are marketing themselves towards content and course creators, however the structure of their community is geared towards creating long discussions, and long form writing.
I'm a member of a neuroscience community hosted on circle, it works great.
as a cherry on top you can host it on your own website, and change the appearance.
the only con i see is the pricing.
They are marketing themselves towards content and course creators, however the structure of their community is geared towards creating long discussions, and long form writing.
I'm a member of a neuroscience community hosted on circle, it works great.
as a cherry on top you can host it on your own website, and change the appearance.
the only con i see is the pricing.
This post was marked as dead — probably because your account is new — so I vouched it. However, you might want to email dang about getting that account flag turned off (or probably it's a karma limit) so you can resubmit and get more eyes on your question. [email protected] is a monitored address and he usually replies pretty fast.
Tough to really answer as each has it's advantages and disadvantages. I value data ownership so I will always lean towards self-hosting, but that isn't always practical as we are talking about a community, not one person or even a small group of highly technical users.
Maintaining reliable access to your user's email will be a constant source of frustration. The reality is, email is old, and fragile and the last 15+ years companies have spent enormous amounts of energy reducing spam. They have also been consolidating the space of who is a trusted sender. So unless you have a large set of users who are willing to fight spam blockers, a willing moderation team able to handle communication problems between your list and sometimes unresponsive postmasters, you might not want to continue to rely on this.
I maintain a small web forum and I have to constantly monitor my logs and be in contact with email postmasters because I use email verification for the registration process. Even still, emails from my board end up in spam boxes. You could forego email verification of your web forum and use moderator verification instead if your group isn't large or if there is some other way to verify your users. However, now communication has become more active rather than passive, so this might not be something that is compatible with your user base. As they will need to remember to go somewhere to catch the latest messages without some sort of reminder or notification via email.
Going to Google Groups or another hosted email system will massively remove a lot of these administrative headaches. These companies are places your users are probably already spending a lot of time, they also are a trusted sender by most postmasters so you will see good receive rates, but now you are tying your fate to that of company who's interest might not be aligned with yours or who may end up changing the rules or taking away the service you have begun to rely on for communication.
You could go with a hybrid approach, pay for an SMTP service and funnel your email through their system, but I have found that unless you have extremely low volume this is unreliable for free, so you should be prepared to pay for this service and get a dedicated IP so that you have some control over the IP's status on blocklists.
Utilizing other social media should be the lowest on the list of options, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. This is really not that different than just hosting a forum, however if your user base spends a lot of time on these platforms or relies on them for other uses, then this point would be moot. However, as with the Google Groups option, you are now tying your community to a company that might not have their interests aligned with yours.
Good luck in your search.
Maintaining reliable access to your user's email will be a constant source of frustration. The reality is, email is old, and fragile and the last 15+ years companies have spent enormous amounts of energy reducing spam. They have also been consolidating the space of who is a trusted sender. So unless you have a large set of users who are willing to fight spam blockers, a willing moderation team able to handle communication problems between your list and sometimes unresponsive postmasters, you might not want to continue to rely on this.
I maintain a small web forum and I have to constantly monitor my logs and be in contact with email postmasters because I use email verification for the registration process. Even still, emails from my board end up in spam boxes. You could forego email verification of your web forum and use moderator verification instead if your group isn't large or if there is some other way to verify your users. However, now communication has become more active rather than passive, so this might not be something that is compatible with your user base. As they will need to remember to go somewhere to catch the latest messages without some sort of reminder or notification via email.
Going to Google Groups or another hosted email system will massively remove a lot of these administrative headaches. These companies are places your users are probably already spending a lot of time, they also are a trusted sender by most postmasters so you will see good receive rates, but now you are tying your fate to that of company who's interest might not be aligned with yours or who may end up changing the rules or taking away the service you have begun to rely on for communication.
You could go with a hybrid approach, pay for an SMTP service and funnel your email through their system, but I have found that unless you have extremely low volume this is unreliable for free, so you should be prepared to pay for this service and get a dedicated IP so that you have some control over the IP's status on blocklists.
Utilizing other social media should be the lowest on the list of options, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. This is really not that different than just hosting a forum, however if your user base spends a lot of time on these platforms or relies on them for other uses, then this point would be moot. However, as with the Google Groups option, you are now tying your community to a company that might not have their interests aligned with yours.
Good luck in your search.
Thanks for your input, kxrm. CCL.net is a one-man operation and the owner (Jan Labanowski) has been running it for many years and has seen many if not all of the problems you mention.
Does it need to be a mailing list? You can set up a messageboard using discourse.org for free as you are a non-profit.
I have to agree with a bunch of what kxrm said. Email can be hard and I think paying for an MTA probably wouldn't work for a site that allows third-party users to send messages. Paid MTAs don't generally want to be sending mail that you're relaying on behalf of untrusted (or only semi-trusted) users.
I think Discourse might be something to look at (https://www.discourse.org). I don't know enough to really offer a great recommendation here, but they offer hosted/paid plans with a pretty good email limits. I think it would allow your users the ability to customize how they received emails and you can reply by email so it can keep the mailing-list-style feeling going. Plus, it's open-source so you could always self-host if you wanted. I think Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), Sam Saffron, and Robin Ward are all pretty well-respected in the community.
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. seems to be a company looking to make something nice in the world (rather than take it over). They make their money as a hosting company and what they host is open source. A lot of people are using Discourse so it wouldn't be blazing new trails. I don't know what your budget is or how many people you have on your mailing list and how much email volume there is, but their hosted prices seem pretty reasonable and they seem to be trying to create a nice business.
kxrm noted Google Groups, but one thing I'd bring up is whether Google Groups is accessible in China. It might be, but you did say "globally accessible" and it seems like there could be a decent likelihood that Google Groups could get blocked in China in the future (even if it's accessible today). I guess you also noted that not everyone has access to Google.
Discourse seems like something they could host, you could use your own subdomain, and could always choose to host it yourself. For some, they might enjoy the web interface. Others can probably just interact over email (again, I don't have a huge amount of experience with Discourse so you'd want to verify it works how you want it to). It seems like it would offer a nice blend of modernity while still offering and email-based flow for those that want that.
I think Discourse might be something to look at (https://www.discourse.org). I don't know enough to really offer a great recommendation here, but they offer hosted/paid plans with a pretty good email limits. I think it would allow your users the ability to customize how they received emails and you can reply by email so it can keep the mailing-list-style feeling going. Plus, it's open-source so you could always self-host if you wanted. I think Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), Sam Saffron, and Robin Ward are all pretty well-respected in the community.
Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. seems to be a company looking to make something nice in the world (rather than take it over). They make their money as a hosting company and what they host is open source. A lot of people are using Discourse so it wouldn't be blazing new trails. I don't know what your budget is or how many people you have on your mailing list and how much email volume there is, but their hosted prices seem pretty reasonable and they seem to be trying to create a nice business.
kxrm noted Google Groups, but one thing I'd bring up is whether Google Groups is accessible in China. It might be, but you did say "globally accessible" and it seems like there could be a decent likelihood that Google Groups could get blocked in China in the future (even if it's accessible today). I guess you also noted that not everyone has access to Google.
Discourse seems like something they could host, you could use your own subdomain, and could always choose to host it yourself. For some, they might enjoy the web interface. Others can probably just interact over email (again, I don't have a huge amount of experience with Discourse so you'd want to verify it works how you want it to). It seems like it would offer a nice blend of modernity while still offering and email-based flow for those that want that.
Hello mdasen,
Thanks for your input. Self-hosting is pretty much what the owner (Jan Labanowski) has been doing so far, with all the accompanying problems noted by yourself and kxrm. I'm just a long-time CCL.net subscriber and not the owner. As my post here mentions, I'll grab the content of this thread in a while and repost back to the CCL.net mailing list.
MailmanLists is a valid service run by competent people: https://www.mailmanlists.net/
They provide plain good ol' GNU Mailman lists. You can bring your own domain or subdomain. They also have a good handle on privacy issues (GDPR requests and so on).
They provide plain good ol' GNU Mailman lists. You can bring your own domain or subdomain. They also have a good handle on privacy issues (GDPR requests and so on).
Please have the administrator of CCL.net reach out to me at the email in my profile. I can provide compute and bandwidth at no cost to help offset some of the operational burden. Because it would operate from my network under address space I control, I can help with resolving deliverability issues.
You should check out Topicbox: https://www.topicbox.com (disclosure: I worked on it). It's really good hosted mailing lists from the team at Fastmail. My one line description is "Topicbox is to Mailman what Slack is to IRC".
What are my options if I want — what mailman does but:
- email address of any user never disclosed to any other user
- name/username shown should always be predefined — not read from mail/replied received
- easy user management — add/remove/disable/ban/flag-and-put-on-hold etc
— communication not publicly available or indexed
- is not a forum at all — can be read on the web, but can’t be replied from anywhere other than an email client
— way to reply to specific users without knowing their email
- users can stop all or some users to reach out directly to them
- other mailman features
Good to have features:
— enable things like some sort of “slow mode” either for some users or group wide
- email address of any user never disclosed to any other user
- name/username shown should always be predefined — not read from mail/replied received
- easy user management — add/remove/disable/ban/flag-and-put-on-hold etc
— communication not publicly available or indexed
- is not a forum at all — can be read on the web, but can’t be replied from anywhere other than an email client
— way to reply to specific users without knowing their email
- users can stop all or some users to reach out directly to them
- other mailman features
Good to have features:
— enable things like some sort of “slow mode” either for some users or group wide
So Topicbox is annoying to use, overengineered and just plain aggravating?
I'd like to get your recommendations for email mailing list servers or providers. While CCL.net is more than just a mailing list, this is the main way at least a couple of generations of busy scientists have interacted with CCL.
Some have suggested a Google group, a forum or even LinkedIn as a replacement for this mailing list. Such alternative methods of group communication seem to have worked out for some user groups of scientific software packages (especially those mainly focussed on code developers), but I would assert that the breadth of the subject matter (computational chemistry as a whole) favours a 'slower' mode of communication that does not require the user to invest time in regularly checking a website. Additionally, it is worth noting that not everyone, depending on location, has easy access to either Google or LinkedIn.
Hence my request: reliable, secure, globally accessible email list providers/services/software that stand a good chance of sticking around as long as CCL.net already has. I'll summarize replies to the CCL.net list, and post a HN link to the answers here on the CCL.net list. Many thanks!