1 Design notes and philosophy
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4 public-inbox spawned around some basic ideas
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7 * Public, non-real-time, archivable communication is essential to
8 Free and Open Source software development.
10 * Contributing to Free and Open Source projects should not require the
11 use of non-Free/non-Open Source services or software.
13 * Graphical user interfaces should not be required for text-based
16 Challenges to running normal mailing lists
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19 2) bounce processing of invalid/bad email addresses
20 3) processing subscribe/unsubscribe requests
22 Issues 2) and 3) are side-stepped entirely by moving reader
23 subscriptions to git repository synchronization and Atom feeds. There's
24 no chance of faked subscription requests and no need to deal with
25 confused users who cannot unsubscribe.
27 Use existing infrastructure
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30 * public-inbox can coexist with existing mailing lists, any subscriber
31 to the existing mailing list can begin delivering messages to
34 * public-inbox uses SMTP for posting. Posting a message to a public-inbox
35 instance is no different than sending a message to any open mailing
38 * readers may continue using use their choice of mail clients and
39 mailbox formats, only learning a few commands of the ssoma(1) tool
42 * Atom is a reasonable feed format for casual readers and is supported
43 by a variety of feed readers.
48 * Freedom from proprietary services, tools and APIs. Communicating with
49 developers and users of Free Software should not rely on proprietary
52 * Existing infrastrucuture, tools, and user familarity.
53 There is already a large variety of tools, clients, and email providers
54 available. There are also many resources for users to run their own
55 SMTP server on a domain they control.
57 * All public discussion mediums are affected by spam and advertising.
58 There exist several good Free Software anti-spam tools for email.
60 * Privacy is not an issue for public discussion. Public mailing list
61 archives are common and accepted by Free Software communities.
62 There is no need to ask the NSA for backups of your mail archives :)
64 * git, one of the most widely-used version control systems, includes many
65 tools for for email: git-format-patch(1), git-send-email(1), git-am(1).
66 Furthermore, the development of git itself is based on the git mailing
69 * Email is already the de-facto form of communication in many Free Software
72 * Fallback/transition to private email and other lists, in case the
73 public-inbox host becomes unavailable, users may still directly email
74 each other (or Cc: lists for related/dependent projects).
79 * Expose Message-Id in HTML views to encourage replies from drive-by
84 Copyright 2013, Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> and all contributors.
85 License: AGPLv3 or later <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt>