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. Readers may
read via NNTP, Atom feeds or HTML archives.
public-inbox spawned around three main ideas:
* Publicly accessible and archived communication is essential to
Free Software development.
* Contributing to Free Software projects should not require the
use of non-Free 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.
Implementation
--------------
public-inbox uses ssoma[1], Some Sort Of Mail Archiver which implements
no policy of its own. By storing (and optionally) exposing an inbox
via git, it is fast and efficient to host and mirror public-inboxes.
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. Casual readers may also follow
the list via NNTP, Atom feed or HTML archives.
Users of the ssoma[1] command-line tool may 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.
_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/
Features
--------
* anybody may participate via plain-text email
* stores email in git, readers may have a complete archive of the inbox
* Atom feed and NNTP allows casual readers to follow via feed reader
* uses only well-documented and easy-to-implement data formats
Try it out now, see http://try.public-inbox.org/
Requirements for reading:
* any software capable of NNTP or following Atom feeds
Any basic web browser will do for the HTML archives.
We primarily develop on w3m to maximize accessibility.
Requirements (participant)
--------------------------
* any MUA which may send text-only emails ("git send-email" works!)
Users are strongly encouraged to use the "reply-all" feature of
their mailers to reduce the impact of a public-inbox as a
single point of failure.
* participants do not need to install public-inbox, only server admins
Requirements (server)
---------------------
See http://public-inbox.org/INSTALL
Hacking
-------
Source code is available via git:
git clone git://80x24.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).
The archives are readable via NNTP or HTTP:
nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.mail.public-inbox.meta
http://public-inbox.org/meta/
You may also clone all messages via git:
git clone --mirror git://public-inbox.org/meta.git
Or pass the same git repository URL for ssoma using the instructions at:
http://ssoma.public-inbox.org/README.html
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.
See http://public-inbox.org/dc-dlvr-spam-flow.html for more info.
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 2013-2015 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 .
Additional permission under GNU GPL version 3 section 7:
If you modify this program, or any covered work, by linking or
combining it with the OpenSSL project's OpenSSL library (or a
modified version of that library), containing parts covered by the
terms of the OpenSSL or SSLeay licenses, the copyright holder(s)
grants you additional permission to convey the resulting work.
Corresponding Source for a non-source form of such a combination
shall include the source code for the parts of OpenSSL used as well
as that of the covered work.