Yes, they are. I've been editing a document that lays out some of
the strong arguments in their favor. It's still a draft (and may
always be because I keep revising it), but here's a version of it:
--------------
Mailing lists, which were sometimes called "reflectors" in their early
days, are one of the older pieces of Internet technology. Despite that,
they're still heavily used -- including by the very people who built
and still run the Internet, people who could use anything they wanted.
That's not an accident. It's because mailing lists have enormous
technical advantages over the alternatives. Here are some of those:
1. Mailing lists require no special software: anyone with a sensible
mail client can participate. Thus they allow you to use *your* software
with the user interface of *your* choosing rather than being compelled
to learn 687 different web forums with 687 different user interfaces,
all of which range from "merely bad" to "hideously bad".
2. Mailing lists are simple: learn a few basic rules of netiquette and a
couple of Internet-wide conventions, and one's good to go. Web forums
are complicated because all of them are different. In other words,
participating in 20 different mailing lists is just about as easy as
participating in one; but participating in 20 different web forums
is onerous.
3. They impose minimal security risk.
4. They impose minimal privacy risk.
Points 3 and 4 stand in stark contrast to the security and privacy risks
imposed on users of web forums and "social" media, especially the latter.
5. Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly -- an increasing concern for
people on mobile devices and thus on expensive data plans. Web forums
are bandwidth-hungry.
6. Mailing lists interoperate. I can easily forward a message from one
list to another one. Or to a person. I can send a message to multiple
lists. I can forward a message from a person to a list. And so on.
Try doing this with web forum software A on host B with destinations
web forum software X and Y on hosts X1 and Y1. Good luck with that.
7. They're asynchronous: you don't have to interact in real time.
You can download messages when connected to the Internet, then read them
and compose responses when offline.
8. As a result of 7, They work reasonably well even in the presence
of multiple outages and severe congestion. Messages may be delayed,
but once everything's up again, they'll go through. Web-based forums
simply don't work.
9. They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up. Web forums
require that you go fishing for it.
10. They scale beautifully.
11. (When properly run) they're relatively free of abuse vectors.
Mailing lists are highly resistant to abuse. Web forums, because of
their complexity, are highly vulnerable to software security issues
as well as spam/phishing and other attacks.
12. They handle threading well. And provided users take a few seconds
to edit properly, they handle quoting well.
13. They're portable: lists can be rehosted (different domain, different
host) rather easily.
14. They can be freely interconverted -- that is, you can move a list
hosted by A using software B on operating system C to host X using
software Y on operating system Z.
15. They can be written to media and read from it. This is a very
non-trivial task with web forums.
16. The computing resources require to support them are minimal -- CPU,
memory, disk, bandwidth, etc.
17. Mailing lists can be uni- or bidirectionally gatewayed to Usenet.
(The main Python language mailing list is an example of this.) This can
be highly useful.
18. They're easily archivable in a format that is simple and likely to
be readable long into the future. Mail archives from 10, 20, even 30
or more years ago are still completely usable. And they take up very
little space.
[ Numerous tools exist for handling Unix "mbox" format: for
example, "grepmail" is a highly useful basic search tool.
Most search engines include parsers for email, and the task
of ingesting mail archives into search engines is very well
understood. ]
19. You can archive them locally...
20. ...which means you can search them locally with the software of
*your* choice. Including when you're offline. And provided you make
backups, you'll always have an archive -- even if the original goes away.
Web forums don't facilitate this.
[ Those of us who've been around for a while have seen a lot of
web-based discussions vanish forever because a host crashed or a
domain expired or a company went under or a company was acquired
or someone made a mistake or there was a security breach or a
government confiscated it. ]
There's more, but I think this easily suffices to make a slamdunk case.
Frank Zappa once said that you can't be a real country unless you have
a beer and an airline. I don't think you can take an organization or
a project seriously unless it has a mailing list and/or a newsgroup.
Of course there's always a temptation to rush to the latest greatest shiny
thing because it's new and shiny, but those come and go, and they depend
on the vagaries of the companies behind them. Many painful object lessons
in the impermanence of such things may be found at http://archiveteam.org
-- whose contributors have invested heavily in attempts to mitigate the
consequences of ill-advised decision-making by others.
[ One metric -- of many -- for assessing such operations is
to ask this question: can you export ALL of your data and ALL
of your metadata from them, at will, and in a portable, open,
usable format? The answer is almost always no. Even allegedly
open operations like Google Groups fail this test. And if you
can't do that, then you should immediately rule out using it. ]
Not to mention that many of those latest greatest shiny new things
come equipped with hideous privacy and security issues that can't be
fixed because they're fundamental parts of the design. Not that mailing
lists are immune to these -- they're not -- but the privacy and security
exposure is far less.
--------------
Mailing lists may not be a significant percentage of overall email
traffic, but they're a valuable resource and it would be extraordinarily
foolish to even consider getting rid of them.
---rsk
_______________________________________________
dmarc mailing list
dmarc@ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dmarc
