On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 12:31:09PM -0400, John R. Levine wrote: > Incidentally, the reason that mail will never go away is that it is fully > federated, doesn't require people to be online at the same time, and is easy > to archive and search. So far none of the replacements do that. +1, and let me augment this by (partially) quoting something that I wrote a few years ago about mail and mailing lists. Why use mailing lists? ---------------------- Mailing lists, which were sometimes called "reflectors" in their early days, are one of the older pieces of Internet technology. Despite that, they're still heavily used [...] That's not an accident. It's because mailing lists have enormous technical advantages over the alternatives. Here are some of those: 1. Mailing lists require no special software: anyone with a sensible mail client can participate. Thus they allow you to use *your* software with the user interface of *your* choosing rather than being compelled to learn 687 different web forums with 687 different user interfaces, all of which range from "merely bad" to "hideously bad". 2. Mailing lists are simple: learn a few basic rules of netiquette and a couple of Internet-wide conventions, and one's good to go. Web forums are complicated because all of them are different. In other words, participating in 20 different mailing lists is just about as easy as participating in one; but participating in 20 different web forums is really quite onerous. 3. They impose minimal security risk. 4. They impose minimal privacy risk. Points 3 and 4 stand in stark contrast to the security and privacy risks imposed on users of web forums and "social" media, especially the latter. 5. Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly -- an increasing concern for people on mobile devices and thus on expensive data plans. Web forums are bandwidth-hungry. 6. Mailing lists interoperate. I can easily forward a message from one list to another one. Or to a person. I can send a message to multiple lists. I can forward a message from a person to this list. And so on. Try doing this with web forum software A on host B with destinations web forum software C and D on hosts E and F. Good luck with that. 7. They're asynchronous: you don't have to interact in real time. You can download messages when connected to the Internet, then read them and compose responses when offline. 8. As a result of 7, They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple outages and severe congestion. Messages may be delayed, but once everything's up again, they'll go through. Web-based forums simply don't work at all. 9. They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up. Web forums require that you go fishing for it. 10. They scale beautifully. 11. (When properly run) they're relatively free of abuse vectors. Mailing lists are highly resistant to abuse and attacks. Web forums, because of their complexity, are highly vulnerable to software security issues as well as spam/phishing and other attacks. 12. They handle threading well. And provided users take a few seconds to edit properly, they handle quoting well. This is essential for anyone trying to follow a discussion. 13. They're portable: lists can be rehosted (different domain, different host) rather easily. 14. They can be freely interconverted -- that is, you can move a list hosted by A using software B on operating system C to host X using software Y on operating system Z. If you can do this at all with web forums, and you usually can't, it's really, really difficult. 15. They can be written to media and read from it. This is a VERY non-trivial task with web forums, and that's putting it mildly. 16. The computing resources require to support them are minimal -- CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth, etc. 17. Mailing lists can be uni- or bidirectionally gatewayed to Usenet. (The main Python language mailing list is an example of this.) They can also be gatewayed to web sites or to RSS feeds. All of these can be highly useful, because they provide alternative ways for people to receive the same content. 18. They're easily archivable in a format (Unix "mbox" format) that is simple and likely to be readable long into the future. Mail archives from 10, 20, even 30 or more years ago are still completely usable. And they take up very little space: I have hundreds of millions of mailing list messages archived, and the entire collection would fit on a USB stick. [...] 19. You can archive them locally... 20. ...which means you can search them locally with the software of *your* choice. Including when you're offline. And provided you make backups, you'll always have an archive -- even if the original goes away. Web forums don't facilitate this. [...] ---rsk
