Up to now lists have been closed that haven’t had activity for 24 months, which may be a too conservative cut off
I’m going to review the remaining open talk-* mailing lists, as some only have e.g., weeklyOSM newsletters or announcements from TomTom and Mapbox about some organized edit. In addition, if there’s been no replies to a posted message in 2025 they should be closed
Feel free to proactively open a discussion in your communities if you still have a list still open: Do you wish to prioritize this over other OSMF engineering work? I will otherwise open that conversation
If more can be closed, post in the GitHub issue (first link in this message)
Are these all running on their own individual VMs or something?
If even one of them gets migrated don’t the rest come along for the ride? If so the utility of closing rarely-but-still-used mailing lists seems minimal.
If the mailing lists are rarely used, they worsen the experience for new contributors that could be confused why OSM stick to such archaic, not utilized communication forms.
Gone through them all, my conclusion is that 1/3 could just be closed straight away. A lot of the lists are just spammed by weeklyOSM newsletters
The change for local community-related mailing lists, should also be reflected by updating the OSM community index for those communities that hasn’t been updated yet, and also post an announcement within those mailing lists informing whoever is registered in there, about the channels that are currently preferred for their community.
Yes, it seems that there are still quite few people that are informed about their community only via the mailing lists and nothing else. I don’t know why is that still the case, but it occurred to me when I organized a meeting for the Greek community and someone mentioned that it should be posted in the mailing list aswell, and then I found out that a new mapper has registered in there earlier this year, who seemed to not be aware about the other active channels of the Greek community.
For quite a few people ( me included) that still seems the natural way for organisations to communicate with members/stakeholders/whatever. It has the advantage of the messages arriving to me, rather than me having to go to check the board, and I can filter exactly as I want.
But apparently there’s a “mailing list mode” on the community forum - I don’t know what that is exactly but if it were better explained / more obvious, I may feel less alarmed at the loss of the list-serv.
On a PC, when logged in, click your profile picture at top right.
Then select the picture at the bottom of the vertical menu that appears, with a tooltip “Profile”.
Then “Preferences” on the horizon menu,
and below that “Email”.
Then scroll down and tick “Enable mailing list mode”.
This gets forum posts and PMs etc. mailed to you. You can reply by just replying, and your reply will appear with an “email” icon in the topic. Threading is preserved in email messages even though it isn’t on the site(!). See also here. I use filtering at the email server to move some Discourse mails to a subfolder to avoid getting overwhelmed.
I would like to hear from @Firefishy directly, if he agrees with your characterization that maintaining the mailing lists is taking up a meaningful portion of his time that is better directed towards other more pressing efforts.
The mailing lists are not yet taking up much of my time…
Many of the lists no longer have active admins maintaining the list or the pending moderator queues. The pending moderator queues are 99% spam by non-list members. I’ve set some lists to automatically drop or reject non-list members rather than hold.
The outbound openstreetmap.org mail often has issues [1] with delivery to major email providers. We actively monitor our Sender / IP reputation with Google Postmaster Tools, Outlook.com Postmaster tool and ipqualityscore.com. We have an issues with our emails been reported as spam by recipients rather than the recipient unsubscribing from the list or similar. Some major email providers automatically forward the spam reported email headers to our ISP for spam review, which we occasionally have to respond to. SPF leads to horrible workarounds like Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS).
Mail is increasingly becoming difficult to run at scale. DKIM, SPF, DMARC, TLS, DNS PTR, SpamAssassin etc all have an administrative overhead. And there is dealing with weirdproviderlimits.
But…
Mailman2 is dead. I18n broken and unsupported.
The mailman 2 to mailman 3 conversion is expected to be painful. Only active lists will be migrated. The old archives from ALL lists will be kept in the mailman 2 HTML archive format for prosperity.
It is known we will have issues with the hyperkitty_import on old lists due to some of the issues listed here. The “broken” lists will likely take quite a bit of effort to fix. We’ve had at least 1 previous attempt to convert to mailman 3 aborted due to the difficulty in converting.
And then politics…
Mailing lists are the right communication channel for some parts of our OpenStreetMap community. We’ll get mailman 3 setup for them. But I don’t think mailing lists work well for the majority of the community. Let us move everything to 30 second TikTok style videos! </sarcasm>. Change is difficult; stagnation is fatal.
I’ve recently setup Proxmox Mail Gateway for Panoramax which takes care of all of this and simplifies administration.
I’m in favor of closing inactive ML, announce that as soon as possible and point to actual channels on the community index (did this yesterday for France).
Just mentioned this on the AU list & asked for people to comment here.
Currently, most discussions happen on the AU list, the Oceania group here & also on Discord. A few people use all 3 places, some 2 out of 3 (but not all the same 2! ) & a few only use 1 of them & utterly refuse to even consider the other options!
The problem with this, and it is really nothing new and has been pointed out many times, is that the OSMF currently doesn’t offer a lightweight alternative for small communities to move to this platform even when they previously had their own sub-forum on forum.openstreetmap.org .
So this would seem to be moaning about a self inflicted issue.
That is true, and something that should be rectified.
However, many active communities have dormant email lists and have not taken action to clean it up
I now did a test run of posting to the Estonian email list (not used in 2025), and the UX is really user-hostile in today’s age
My first message went to the moderator queue
I signed up as a member to the list, fortunately on my computer
Posted again, it went again to the moderator queue
Hm… Fortunately I use a “real” email client (Mail on macOS) so I have easy access to the junk folder (try that on Gmail.com)
It’s in the junk folder! Move it to my inbox, and confirm the subscription
Post for a third time Success!
These are your own value-judgments as a single user. By all means let’s discuss the resourcing question, but if the proposal is based on ‘new things are better’, even in part, I do not support it.
Fwiw on talk-gb there are folk saying that email offers a better UX than Discourse.
I’m guessing that this is referring to the problem that the advice given to people wanting to move a community here is basically “We do generally like to see at least 3 members in a category moderator team”. Regardless of its merits that has been effective at preventing a couple of dozen country forums being set up here (see at the bottom of the main page below “Migration”). Not making c.osm.org ameniable to requests like this means that people are more likely to move to less inclusive alternatives such as Slack, Facebook, etc. (and Discord and Telegram for chat etc.).
One thing that can be done to make this forum more usable as mailing lists is to enable “topic creating by email” for country forums that want it (see here from a comment on talk-gb about this).
Unfortunately (and this is not necessarily a “self inflicted by OSMF” problem, but a “Discourse help being piss-poor” one) there is no effective documentation that explains the process that category mods must go through to allow topic creation by email. There is this page on the OSM wiki but that has a lot of “don’t know” sections. Is there a formal process to follow beyond just “mods agreeing and asking the admins”?**
I’m guessing that that is referring to this which is making the reasonable point that if people conflate “email” with e.g. the web interface of gmail.com, they may well think that “email” is horrible to use. That’s a reasonable point in general but moot here if you can interact with c.osm.org at least as well as you could with a mailing list.
** I’m saying this as one of the mods of “help and support” here for which “new topics by email” is apparently supported. I seem to remember the process we followed was “just ask Firefishy”, but I may be misremembering…
I was assuming it was a reference to Discourse being incredibly bloated and slow. If I open a private window and tell my browser to emulate 2G then this site becomes a display for 5 dots that fade in and out of existence for 1.3 minutes before eventually showing a few paragraphs worth of headings[1].
I know those over on the Discourse meta site would say that’s “only the first load”, but if your first load of a community site shows an seemingly endless dot animation for over a minute people aren’t ever going to finish that load because it just looks broken. I’ve also had this issue with minor network hiccoughs on much better connections but a least I can usually reload in that case.
that was the second attempt. Disabling cache and reloading under the same requirements took three minutes and resulted in a page that was formatted unreadable. I’ve never managed a successful load while emulating GPRS. ↩︎
No it was, as @SomeoneElse pointed out, a reference to the three mods plus a vote required to just revive an existing group with foreseeable volume of one posting per month.
) & a few only use 1 of them & utterly refuse to even consider the other options! 