On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 2:33 PM B 9 <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 19, 2026 at 5:27 PM Daryl Tester < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> On 20/6/26 04:40, John R. Hogerhuis wrote: >> >> > Every time I get burned by SAAS my tendency is to assert more control. >> > It might also be because I'm a cheapskate. >> >> I can't speak about the latter 🙂, but definitely the former. Yahoo >> Groups, G+, all the others. It's "fine" while you serve their >> interests, until you no longer do. >> >> This group is about preserving and recovering information pertaining to >> a particular niche bit of computing; it would be a shame to throw that >> away (yet the companies don't care). >> > > John, are you willing to consider having the mailing list separate from > the wiki and cloud-t? > > There is an organization that hosts mailing lists for the express purpose > of keeping information open to all, https://freelists.org/. As the name > implies, they are not in it for the money. My first thought when I heard > about them was, if it's not a business, how will it last > <https://www.freelists.org/wiki/will_it_last>? Of course, in hindsight, > they're the ones who are still here (since the year 2000!) while the other > services are gone. > > Freelists is not using Mailman but some other thing that looks old but > easy enough. You can have multiple "list owners" so it would be trivial to > transfer ownership, if the need arises. Subscribers can add and remove > themselves from the list. Archives are automatically created. (For example, > here's the archive of a list for visually impaired programmers > <https://www.freelists.org/archive/program-l/>). Unlike the "free sample" > lists from the commercial offerings like gaggle.com, there is no limit on > the number of subscribers. The main downside of freelists seems to be that > the maximum size of a single message is 5 MB. (Do we even get messages that > long here?) > > The process for creating a new list is a single, simple form > <https://www.freelists.org/signup.html>. All new lists are first checked > by a human to make sure they are reasonable. I tried it just now as a test. > Unless John rules it out, I'll let everyone know how long it takes a > freelists volunteer to get back to me. I'll also report on their list > manager interface — can it do the things I expect John might want, like > importing the current subscribers and archives? If that all looks good, > I'll probe into how resilient their organization is; are they a team or > just some clown who might run away to join the circus at any moment? > > —b9 > > Current plan is to move to a Kamatera server that I already had sitting unused, Daryl Tester is working on it. Idea is to migrate to same software, migrate the user list and archives.
The mailing list will move first, and then the wiki/cloudt etc. There are many solutions that would work. As to team versus clown, the main thing is it's a clown you trust. I do maintain a message size limit default, many of you have run into it. It has gradually increased from 64K ;-) The larger sizes being for direct attachments. I think it's around 1mb now, they get oversized because of members responding to digest mails or adding direct photo attachments. -- John.
