On 31 Aug 2025, at 10:54, Stephen J. Turnbull <steve@turnbull.jp> wrote:
Thank you Stephen for your response; lots of great tips/recommendations!
While (obviously :-) I support the use of mailing lists for collaboration and have used them successfully in multiple contexts for decades, you should pay careful attention to the user experience.
Absolutely, I’m currently gathering information to ensure that the transition goes as smoothly as possible.
- Make sure that users have access to good threading in their MUAs. Gmail "conversations" aren't a great model; that's about the minimum capability. You may also want to provide a corporate webmail server. I can't recommend a good one; we just decommissioned ours in favor of IMAP access because everybody has a personal MUA with a better UI. (I think we're using Cyrus imapd suite.)
Currently I’m recommending mail.app for our mac users and thunderbird for windows. Our teams are not particularly technical. It’s truly rare to find GUI email clients which show threads properly (who answered to what message precisely). Going through the options here (https://useplaintext.email/) for non technical users, it’s hard to find good solutions.
- More important than wiping out top-posting is that everyone agree on style.
For now, I have settled on the practices suggested by the LKML. We will modify these to fit our specific needs as we notice they are lacking.
- The HyperKitty archiver was designed with the "we demand Discord" crowd in mind.
I find that HyperKitty is difficult to read - the indentation on threads is not clear enough to understand complicated threads. I find it very useful to see a graph which shows the precise hierarchy of a thread. From an archive I’m looking only for ease of navigation, robust search and easily being able to send a link to a particular message, I find that https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/7/4/174 has a super clear archive.
The idea of IETF's MailArchive is really cool. Although I don’t find it the easiest to navigate, it’s easy to add that server to your MUA to navigate however you like.
- Colleagues who are new to mailing lists will need training and encouragement in netiquette. Reply style (top vs interlinear) is mentioned above. Mailing lists are prone to branching threads. Members need to learn to (1) change the subject when mutating the topic so that subthreads can be distinguished and (2) use new posts to start a new topic (ie, "don't hijack threads"). You write that GitLab collaboration has been successful for you, so it may be that your discussions are usually quite linear, and (1) may not be so important for you.
These are some really great points. Especially when it comes to best practices for subject lines. If you know of any good netiquette practices which have been documented (à la https://subspace.kernel.org/etiquette.html) please let me know!
- Some posters will tend to combine several somewhat related issues in one post, which naturally leads to many branches into subthreads. This likely will work itself out, but it can be a point of irritation for some users. Just remember that mailing lists afford that style of posting more so than forums or tracker issues do.
For sure! That is why having an archive which makes it easy to understand the hierarchy of the subthreads is critical.
GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
We are looking for a service which would host and manage our mailing list setup (like mailmanlists.net). If you own or run such a service, we are interested in being a client! Please let me know!
Rodrigo