Mailing lists are one of the main ways we communicate in the free software world. They’re crucial to the day to day work, as well as the planning and debate, of most projects.
Now, each Launchpad team can have its own mailing list hosted and managed by Launchpad. If you run a team in Launchpad, simply visit your team’s overview page to request your list. If you want to subscribe to a list, first join the team that owns it and then subscribe. Full details are in our guide.
Let’s look at some of what Launchpad brings to mailing lists:
- Simplified administration. As someone running a list, Launchpad does everything for you: you don’t need to manage a server and there’s no mailing list software for you to patch.
- Simplified subscription management. As a list subscriber, all you need are your Launchpad login details and your team memberships. Nothing more to it. Change your email address? Update it once in your Launchpad profile and it’s automatically effective for your mailing list subscriptions. To subscribe to a list, all you need is to be a member of the relevant team.
- Post from any email address. You can post to your Launchpad mailing lists from any email address registered in your Launchpad profile.
- Automatic archiving and distribution. Launchpad lists are automatically archived for history, in a format that is easily cataloged by search engines. Copies are also archived on mail-archive.com, a popular long-term list archive site.
The full details on creating and joining mailing lists in Launchpad are available in our guide.
What about the Loco Teams which already have a mailing list running on GNU Mailman. If the Loco Team has a launch pad team as well, can the new mailing list in launchpad be integrated with the existing mailing list?
Else, some people might join the launchpad mailing while the discussions happen in the main mailing list, leaving people to get confused as well as miss the discussions in which they might have participated.
I like newsgroups better than mailing lists because easy to join and easy to download old messages.
Any plans for newsgroup?
technofreak: Please note that you don’t /have/ to create a mailing list for your Launchpad teams! If you want to keep your current Loco’s mailing list where it is, there is no problem.
n: I like NNTP access too. We currently do not automatically archive to Gmane, but that might be a good idea. I’ll submit a bug report on this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/ bug/208238
Perhaps we could use the google groups method of mailing-lists.
mailing-lists can be a burden to those who stretch themselves to thin. If we make it so that it’s like a threaded message board/ forum that has a mailing-list newsgroup interface but, of corse, could be posted to from the web, given good spam filters, this would be more friendly and convenient. If you could make the archives more searchable, this would be a severe improvement