A grumble about Yahoogroups August 16, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : COP, tools , trackbackEmail groups are a simple form of many-to-many communication which have been in use since before the www , in parallel with usenet and early bulletin boards. They remain the principal community tool for many communities of practice, interest groups, support communites and so on. This is a grumble about one particular egroups platform in widespread use, namely yahoogroups. A month or so ago, the company which provides the Yahoogroups service released a series of ‘improvements’.
For people who subscribe via the digest version, which presents a series of messages in one single email, the format of the digest was improved so that individual messages can be replied to by clicking on the appropriate link. All very good for those who like to take a cursory interest in groups through the digest experience, which is at least better than going ‘nomail’ I suppose.
But at the same time, if you subscribe fully and receive all the individual emails, carefully filtered into a seperate folder and threaded by your choice of email client software, you will notice that a whole swathe of info, ads and links have been added to the end of every single mail! The appendage is about a page long in my setup, and causes me additional scrolling, which is a nuisance I would prefer to do without.
Below is an example of what I am talking about, from the last email I received from Nancy White’s excellent online facilitation group:
While some of the information may be necessary, ( unsubscribe instructions help to avoid annoying requests sent to a list) a lot of it is irrelevant to the specific group and padded out with a lot of white space which only wears out the scroll wheel, mouse or keyboard and wastes valuable interaction time.
Grump.
As for alternatives, well the easy option is the simplified but not perfect service offered by competitor Googlegroups , or the open source Mailman system which needs to be hosted somewhere of your own.
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7 Comments
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is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
Here’s a little hint that reduces, but does not do away with the ads. In your preferences in Yahoogroups ALWAYS specify text email, not HTML. You get a lot fewer ads. I’m always surprised to see screenshots like yours, because it is very different from what I see. In fact most times I get no ads!
Last I checked, YahooGroups was bad because it sets Reply-To to the list (breaking good email client reply commands), it wants write access to your web browser before you can view archives, and you have to give personal data to Yahoo before you can download files or take part in polls.
Last I checked, GoogleGroups was bad because it tries its hardest to make you give google your personal data and it bans entire top-level-domains like .coop from their lists.
There are many free list-hosting services out there (such as freelists.org for technology, or riseup.net for radical social change), and some mailing list packages easier to set up right than Mailman. There’s really little incentive to use services like YahooGroups and GoogleGroups which do this simple thing badly.
Ah thanks for the tip, Nancy. I’ve never opted in to HTML emails, but found a preference and have now changed from “Fully featured” to “Traditional” LOL, so I’ll see how that goes and maybe post another screenshot.
MJR - thanks for the comment and particularly the suggestions for free list-hosting services.
I don’t agree with you about the default reply-to group though. In my experience reply-to sender tends to kills off group conversations and encourage low volume announcement type lists rather than extended many-to-many threads.
Would be interested to see if you could get an open-source e-mail list server set up (have you got a virtual server yet?).
QMail seems to be the general open-source mail server of choice, but I’m not sure if it can handle discussion lists…
What I did is add groups with RSS (like the online facilitation) to my aggregator. That reduces email and through the heading (interesting or not) I can decide to read or not. I think that’s just perfect! Only not all groups do have RSS I believe. (have to check)
@Andy - reply-to should not be touched. People should use good mail clients which support mailing lists well and can do a list-reply based on the List-Post header if desired, as well as the normal reply and reply-to-all. It should be the user’s choice which reply to make: the list server should not try to make reply-to-author difficult by subverting Reply-To or using non-standard headers like Mail-Followup-To.
@Frankie Roberto - qmail is not open source in the OSI sense, last I checked. You cannot improve it and share the improved version. As a result, there are many qmail servers running with the totally inappropriate default messages, like the “Failure Notice” used entertainingly in http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2005/4/12wayne.html
Exim, Postfix and Sendmail seem to be better choices - all will support most of the mailing list software.