Thanks, John. I trust you and Darren to get it sorted. —b9
On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 3:00 PM John R. Hogerhuis <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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. >
