On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 11:02:00AM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > Mailing lists are a broken technology. [big snip] I disagree in part and agree in part. Mailing lists are still massively useful and *clearly* superior, by a huge margin, to things like web-based message boards. I'll go so far as to say that no organization or project can be taken seriously unless it supports at least one mailing list for announcements and/or communication. On the other hand, mailing lists have (recently) taken a beating thanks to the ill-advised deployment of incompatible technology (like DMARC) by some major email providers. Ironically, the very same email providers which have allegedly done this to prevent email abuse are systemic and chronic *sources* of email abuse AND are among the very worst about fielding complaints and acting on them in a timely, efficient, comprehensive manner. Thus while I agree in part with you, I would argue that it's not mailing lists which are broken, per se, it's some very large email operations that are broken, thanks to incompetence and negligence, salted liberally with arrogance. On the other hand, while mailing lists scale well -- to a point -- they do not scale as well as Usenet news: > We used to have a system of that type, it was called NNTP. There are methods (supported by Mailman, incidentally) that allow bidirectional gatewaying between mailing lists and newsgroups. The Python language folks have been using that for years, and while it's not without its occasional issues, it seems to work quite well. (I've been monitoring both the SMTP- and NNTP-delivered versions and comparing them.) Is that kind of gatewaying something that might be appropriate for the IETF's lists? ---rsk