[GoLUG] Mailing list, long term.

[Ron]

Steve Litt wrote on 2025-08-14 14:29:

> All email clients suck. Claws-mail, Evolution and Mutt suck the least,
> but they all suck.

Debatable. Thunderbird is pretty competent at minimum. Some of us even 
like it.


> Now's my chance not to saddle the user with an email
> client.

Everyone *already* has an email client. Probably configured how they 
like it.


> Also, NNTP has fallen out of use, meaning that I'd get less help with a
> NNTP based MindMeld.

Less help than something you write yourself, which not a single other 
person on the planet has experience with?



Like Barry said, I wouldn't tell someone not to do what you're proposing 
to do, it's a learning experience at minimum.

But be realistic about uptake.


Have you polled this list to see who'd install the client and run it 
full-time?  Isn't it worth at least asking?

Barry said (and I imagine others would agree) that proprietary options 
are off the table. How to you plan on overcoming that challenge?

Is the idea to shut down the mailing list and force us to install your 
app, or run both and double workload or risk splitting the messages 
across platforms?


Even if every mailing list in the world switches to "Mind Meld", we'll 
all still have email clients running, right?




The problem with email, aside from spam, isn't even the clients, it's 
the servers.

SPF is easy.
DKIM is set-and-forget, pretty easy
DMARC is easy to set up and the XML reports are useless because "XML"


The problem is:

 > postconf | wc -l
 > 1053

Yeah, over one thousand configuration options just for postfix.

Excluding gray-listing, spam detection and filtering, and mailbox storage.

For another example, if one wishes IMAP:

 > doveconf | wc -l
 > 1446

That's a *lot* of options to worry about on services exposed to the 
internet and probed multiple times per second, 24/7.



<digression>

Strange that the "I hate $software because too complicated" folks never 
mention email.

Nor X11, which Xorg themselves abandoned as too complex a collection of 
decades of patching to bother with anymore.

And which has zero security (Discord window can see all the inputs to my 
banking web page?!?).

</digression>