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The End of Gmane? (ingebrigtsen.no)

Posted by msmash on from the all-good-things-come-to-end dept.

If any of you use mailing list archive Gmane, you would want to start looking at its alternative. Gmane developer Lars Ingebrigtsen announced Thursday that he is thinking about ending the decade-old email-to-news gateway. But first, for those unaware about Gmane, here's is what it does: It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Gmane is an archive; it never expires messages (unless explicitly requested by users). Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service.Ingebrigtsen said Gmane machines are under numerous DDoS attacks -- coupled with some other issues -- that have made him wonder whether it is worth the time and effort to keep Gmane ticking. He writes: I'm thinking about ending Gmane, at least as a web site. Perhaps continue running the SMTP-to-NNTP bridge? Perhaps not? I don't want to make 20-30K mailing lists start having bouncing addresses, but I could just funnel all incoming mail to /dev/null, I guess... The nice thing about a mailing list archive (with NNTP and HTTP interfaces) is that it enables software maintainers to say (whenever somebody suggests using Spiffy Collaboration Tool of the Month instead of yucky mailing lists) is "well, just read the stuff on Gmane, then". I feel like I'm letting down a generation here.As Gmane's future remains uncertain, Ingebrigtsen recommends people to have a look at Mail Archive.

2 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing of value was lost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Newsgroups are obsolete, and they've been obsolete for 20 years. And email is rapidly dying, too. I send and receive far fewer emails than 10 years ago. Sharing has replaced forwarding and chat systems have replaced a lot of the other messages. Newsgroups are obsolete and mailing lists are rapidly heading in that direction. So, who cares that Gmane is dead? Unless you haven't moved on from the 1990s, you shouldn't care at all.

  2. NSA by 110010001000 · · Score: 1, Troll

    Sounds like a NSA honeypot. It never deletes messages? Also, what is SMTP and NNTP? Sounds like spy stuff. We better get rid of this.