Design notes and philosophy --------------------------- Challenges to running normal mailing lists ------------------------------------------ 1) spam 2) bounce processing of invalid/bad email addresses 3) processing subscribe/unsubscribe requests Issues 2) and 3) are side-stepped entirely by moving reader subscriptions to git repository synchronization and Atom feeds. There's no chance of faked subscription requests and no need to deal with confused users who cannot unsubscribe. Use existing infrastructure --------------------------- * public-inbox can coexist with existing mailing lists, any subscriber to the existing mailing list can begin delivering messages to public-inbox-mda(1) * public-inbox uses SMTP for posting. Posting a message to a public-inbox instance is no different than sending a message to any open mailing list. * readers may continue using use their choice of mail clients and mailbox formats, only learning a few commands of the ssoma(1) tool is required. * Atom is a reasonable feed format for casual readers and is supported by a variety of feed readers. Why email? ---------- * Freedom from proprietary services, tools and APIs. Communicating with developers and users of Free Software should not rely on proprietary tools or services. * Existing infrastrucuture, tools, and user familarity. There is already a large variety of tools, clients, and email providers available. There are also many resources for users to run their own SMTP server on a domain they control. * All public discussion mediums are affected by spam and advertising. There exist several good Free Software anti-spam tools for email. * Privacy is not an issue for public discussion. Public mailing list archives are common and accepted by Free Software communities. There is no need to ask the NSA for backups of your mail archives :) * git, one of the most widely-used version control systems, includes many tools for for email: git-format-patch(1), git-send-email(1), git-am(1). Furthermore, the development of git itself is based on the git mailing list. * Email is already the de-facto form of communication in many Free Software communities. * Fallback/transition to private email and other lists, in case the public-inbox host becomes unavailable, users may still directly email each other (or Cc: lists for related/dependent projects). Copyright --------- Copyright 2013, Eric Wong and all contributors. License: AGPLv3 or later