Mailing lists on the web, and email account

[prathapml]

Mail To News And Back Again

Free software is mainly developed on mailing lists. Mailing lists have many advantages over other forms of communication, but they have two weaknesses: It's difficult to follow discussions in a sensible way, and mailing list archives (when they exist) have a tendency to disappear over time.

Several mailing list archives exist, but these are all hidden under a web interface. Reading mail that way is not convenient. Reading mail as if it were news is convenient.

This is what Gmane offers. Mailing lists are funneled into news groups. This isn't a new idea; several mail-to-news gateways exist. What's new with Gmane is that no messages are ever expired from the server, and the gateway is bidirectional. You can post to some of these mailing lists without being subscribed to them yourself, depending on whether the mailing lists allow non-subscribers to post or not.

In addition, Gmane does spam detection, cross-post handling, has a TMDA-fueled encryption/forwarding service, a web interface, respects X-No-Archive, supplies RSS feeds, uses SPF, features user-defined filters, gathers traffic statistics, and has a real-time indexing search engine.

Gmane