public-inbox - an "archives first" approach to mailing lists ------------------------------------------------------------ public-inbox implements the sharing of an email inbox via git to complement or replace traditional mailing lists. public-inbox spawned around three main ideas: * Publically accessible and archived communication is essential to Free and Open Source development. * Contributing to Free and Open Source projects should not require the use of non-Free/non-Open Source services or software. * Graphical user interfaces should not be required for text-based communication. public-inbox aims to be easy-to-deploy and manage; encouraging projects to run their own instances with minimal overhead. Features -------- * anybody may participate via plain-text email * stores email in git, readers have a complete archive of the inbox * Atom feed allows casual readers to follow via feed reader * Mail user-agent (MUA) users may use Maildir, mbox(5) and/or IMAP locally * uses only well-documented and easy-to-implement data formats Implementation -------------- public-inbox uses ssoma[1], Some Sort Of Mail Archiver which implements no policy of its own. By exposing an inbox via git, readers may follow the inbox without subscribing via SMTP and have easy access to old messages. Traditional mailing lists use the "push" model. For readers, this requires commitment to subscribe and effort to unsubscribe. New readers may also have difficulty following existing discussions if archives do not expose Message-ID headers for responses. List server admins may be burdened with delivery failures. public-inbox uses the "pull" model. Readers import mail into an mbox, Maildir, or IMAP folder from git repositories periodically. If a reader loses interest, they simply stop syncing. Since we use git, mirrors are easy-to-setup, and lists are easy-to-relocate to different mail addresses without losing/splitting archives. Dedicated readers only need to install ssoma, a command-line tool[1] currently implemented in Perl. Casual readers may also follow the list via Atom feed or web archives. _Anybody_ may also setup a delivery-only mailing list server to replay a public-inbox git archive to subscribers via SMTP. [1] http://ssoma.public-inbox.org/README Requirements (Atom, read-only client) ------------------------------------- * any feed reader capable of following Atom feeds Any basic web browser will do for the HTML archives. Requirements (participant) -------------------------- * ssoma - http://ssoma.public-inbox.org/INSTALL * any MUA which may send text-only emails ("git send-email" works!) * participants do not need to install public-inbox, only server admins Requirements (server) --------------------- See INSTALL Hacking ------- Source code is available via git: git clone git://bogomips.org/public-inbox See below for contact info. Contact ------- We are happy to see feedback of all types via plain-text email. public-inbox discussion is self-hosting on public-inbox.org Please send comments, user/developer discussion, patches, bug reports, and pull requests to our public-inbox address at: meta@public-inbox.org Please Cc: all recipients when replying as we do not require subscription. This also makes it easier to rope in folks of tangentially related projects we depend on (e.g. git developers on git@vger.kernel.org). You can subscribe via ssoma(1), LISTNAME is a name of your choosing: URL=git://git.public-inbox.org/public-inbox LISTNAME=public-inbox # to initialize a maildir (this may be a new or existing maildir, # ssoma will not touch existing messages) # If you prefer mbox, use "ssoma add mbox ..." instead ssoma add $LISTNAME $URL maildir:/path/to/maildir/ # read with your favorite MUA (only using mutt as an example) mutt -f /path/to/maildir # (or /path/to/mbox) # to keep your mbox or maildir up-to-date, periodically run the following: ssoma sync $LISTNAME # your MUA may modify and delete messages from the maildir or mbox, # this does not affect ssoma functionality at all # to sync all your ssoma subscriptions ssoma sync Anti-Spam --------- The maintainer of public-inbox has found SpamAssassin a good tool for filtering his personal mail, and it will be the default spam filtering tool in public-inbox. Readers may also use a custom mail-delivery-agent for delivery to enable spam filtering by having ssoma deliver to a command via pipe. There is unlikely to be any tool which is 100% accurate at classifying spam, so it is possible to remove messages using the ssoma-rm(1) tool in ssoma. Content Filtering ----------------- To discourage phishing, web bugs (tracking), viruses and other nuisances, only plain-text content is allowed and non-text content is stripped. This saves I/O bandwidth and storage, which is important as entire mail archives are shared between clients. As of the 2010s, successful online social networks and forums are the ones which heavily restrict users formatting options; so public-inbox aims to preserve the focus on content, and not presentation. Copyright --------- Copyright 2013, Eric Wong and all contributors. License: AGPLv3 or later This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see .