Why I Hate Mailing Lists

By Daniel Miessler on April 4th, 2007: Tagged as Rants | Technology

I just recently posted two messages to a message list I lurk in. I don’t do this often, and now I remember why. Within a few minutes I’ve received probably 25 messages from various happless individuals who have fcuking auto-responders placed on the email address they use for mailing lists.

Then there’s the whole list of people who’s addresses are invalid for whatever reason. God I hate this medium. It’s time for it to phase out. I love the interaction, but for the love of God let’s modernize the implementation.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to implement something better all day, but I already have a project going on (and another in the queue), so I don’t see any interesting thought progress made in that direction any time soon.

Oh well…

  • http://www.tssci-security.com/ Marcin

    Yeah, it’s already out. It’s called a forum or message board ;)

  • http://www.tssci-security.com/ Marcin

    Yeah, it’s already out. It’s called a forum or message board ;)

  • http://dmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

    Interesting, I’ll check into it. Do they have a link to it on altavista.com? That’s where I search for stuff. ;)

  • http://dmiessler.com Daniel Miessler

    Interesting, I’ll check into it. Do they have a link to it on altavista.com? That’s where I search for stuff. ;)

  • http://sevenroot.org/ Darren Chamberlain

    I’ve found that most of the lists I’m on — which are mostly deeply technical lists hosted by the w3.org, sourceforge, perl.org, python.org, and so on — tend to not have this problem. I don’t know what kinds of lists you’re on, of course, but I think the symptoms you are describing are symptoms of amateurism (not on your part; I mean the people who are setting up the autoresponders), and not inherent in the medium. For many lists, something like Google/Yahoo groups are probably the most appropriate — I think that those systems do a good job at filtering out this kind of thing, while mailman and majordomo don’t even attempt it.

    @Marcin: I have never been able to get into web-based message boards and forums. The batch-based nature of the web simply doesn’t translate well to an interactive conversation. I’ve yet to see a forums system that doesn’t repeat all of the problems of usenet, without any of the solutions or optimizations that arose around usenet, like intelligent, protocol-specific clients and redistribution/local caching.

  • http://sevenroot.org/ Darren Chamberlain

    I’ve found that most of the lists I’m on — which are mostly deeply technical lists hosted by the w3.org, sourceforge, perl.org, python.org, and so on — tend to not have this problem. I don’t know what kinds of lists you’re on, of course, but I think the symptoms you are describing are symptoms of amateurism (not on your part; I mean the people who are setting up the autoresponders), and not inherent in the medium. For many lists, something like Google/Yahoo groups are probably the most appropriate — I think that those systems do a good job at filtering out this kind of thing, while mailman and majordomo don’t even attempt it.

    @Marcin: I have never been able to get into web-based message boards and forums. The batch-based nature of the web simply doesn’t translate well to an interactive conversation. I’ve yet to see a forums system that doesn’t repeat all of the problems of usenet, without any of the solutions or optimizations that arose around usenet, like intelligent, protocol-specific clients and redistribution/local caching.

  • http://slashback.org/blog/ Tim

    Yeah. A forum or nntp server works so much better than a mailing list.

  • http://slashback.org/blog/ Tim

    Yeah. A forum or nntp server works so much better than a mailing list.

  • E

    Any decent mail filter (e.g., procmail) can handle this problem

  • E

    Any decent mail filter (e.g., procmail) can handle this problem

  • Neil

    “A forum with an accompanying RSS/Atom feed”


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