Why Use Mailing Lists?

Summary

Re: Fully functional email address On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 12:31:09PM -0400, John R. Levine wrote: > Incidentally, the reason that mail will never go away is that it is fully > federated, doesn't require people to be online at the same time, and is easy > to archive and search. So far none of the replacements do that. +1, and let me augment this by (partially) quoting something that I wrote a few years ago about mail and mailing lists. Why use mailing lists? ---------------------- Mailing lists, which were sometimes called "reflectors" in their early days, are one of the older pieces of Internet technology. Despite that, they're still heavily used [...] That's not an accident. It's because mailing lists have enormous technical advantages over the alternatives. Here are some of those: 1. Mailing lists require no special software: anyone with a sensible mail client can participate. Thus they allow you to use *your* software with the user interface of *your* choosing rather than being compelled to learn 687 different web forums with 687 different user interfaces, all of which range from "merely bad" to "hideously bad". 2. Mailing lists are simple: learn a few basic rules of netiquette and a couple of Internet-wide conventions, and one's good to go. Web forums are complicated because all of them are different. In other words, participating in 20 different mailing lists is just about as easy as participating in one; but participating in 20 different web forums is really quite onerous. 3. They impose minimal security risk. 4. They impose minimal privacy risk. Points 3 and 4 stand in stark contrast to the security and privacy risks imposed on users of web forums and "social" media, especially the latter. 5. Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly -- an increasing concern for people on mobile devices and thus on expensive data plans. Web forums are bandwidth-hungry. 6. Mailing lists interoperate. I can easily forward a message from one list to another one. Or to a person. I ca...