Joly MacFie writes: > What are the arguments pro / con migration to Google groups?
Pro: It's free. As a list owner, it's easy to get started and manage (partly because there are few options), and after that you need invest no money and probably no time. Google will give you 4-sigma uptime and be back up quickly (minutes or hours) if it ever goes down. You can be very sure that they've implemented (most) email standards properly, and they have implemented the ARC protocol which significantly increases the likelihood of list posts being accepted by large email providers (freemail as well as large corporations and governments). Con: Aside from the "de-Googling" suite of reasons: - In the event of a problem (admittedly unlikely), Google documentation is minimal and support is nonexistent if you're non-paying surveillance fodder. I imagine there's a user forum where Google mail engineers occasionally hang out and there are experienced users who have figured things out for themselves, but based on my experience with such fora (including the Gmail one. although that was a decade ago), help is way less reliable than it is here. And Google itself will respond to bug reports and feature requests in their own sweet time -- we may not *do* any more than they do, but at least we'll respond with "soon", "it's planned but not for the next release", "Real Soon Now[tm]", or "against our religion" within a day or two.[1] And if you really want something that bad, there are programmers who will do it for money, and even contribute it back to Mailman so you never have to choose between your feature and an official upgrade as part of the deal. - Google, like Trump, never apologizes or admits mistakes. If something Real Bad[tm] happens, you're on your own. - I also have to wonder if various Gmail annoyances (eg, requiring mail with "@gmail.com" From addresses to actually be sent from Gmail or get silently discarded, despite a p=none DMARC setting) would apply. You probably don't care about that with a Google Group, but some of us do. - If you're outside of Google, any problems with messages to or from Gmail can be diagnosed (by people with relevant expertise) to some extent by trying to send messages to or from Gmail. If you've a Google Group, you're dependent on Google support. (Unlike the bugs and downtime I made light of above, problems with messages to Gmail are common. Not so much messages from Gmail.) - As a list owner, I would consider the reported lack of admin options to control annoyances such as large attachments, specific types of attachments, and HTML pretty deficient. (HTML email hate is a personal foible, YMMV.) A few random idiosyncratic whines: when I last used them (as a subscriber) - there were few subscriber options, - the ones they had had to be set subscription by subscription, Steve Footnotes: [1] I'll admit Google did respond with "against our religion" when I asked them to fix the "can't receive own posts via mailing list" bug. That's also when I decided that Gmail was my go-to for email from people and mostly corporations whose email I never wanted to see. :-) -- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.python.org/ Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/ Member address: [email protected]
