Google groups alternatives?

June 26, 2024 6:38 AM

A group of academic friends would like to set up an old-fashioned email mailing list for about 200 people. This is too many people for the free groups.io tier. We're investigating academic listserv hosting. Are there any other alternatives to Google groups in 2024? We would like any group member to be able to post to the list (though posts might be approved by an admin).
posted by yarntheory to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

A private subreddit?
posted by Thorzdad at 6:53 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

Younger people achieve this by setting up a private Discord server.
posted by Silvery Fish at 6:56 AM on June 26 [7 favorites]

I also came to say invite-only Discord server. One great thing about Discord is that if half the people are talking about some subject the others are not interested in, you can create separate channels for that.
posted by anastasiav at 7:12 AM on June 26 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I know and use Discord and Slack, but I really do want a mailing list! Please share email-focused solutions.
posted by yarntheory at 8:13 AM on June 26 [4 favorites]

I would be able to do this through my university's sympa install (which is primarily used for internal mailing lists but does support external members). Maybe one of the people leading the effort has access to something like this?

(You uh may find divergences of opinion as to whether mid-career and younger academics in this day and age want to be on more mailing lists than they already are.)
posted by advil at 8:17 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

Looking up some alternatives, I found Framagroupes which appears to be what you want, but I have no experience with it.
posted by Aleyn at 11:37 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

groups.io's paid tier is only $20/month for up to 500 users. You can get your members to chip in to help with the costs.

groups.io handles all the horrors of DKIM and other content verification so that your email will actually get delivered. Otherwise, your emails will likely go underlivered
posted by scruss at 1:52 PM on June 26 [1 favorite]

If any of you have ample web hosting and are that flavour of nerdy, there is open-source software for this kind of thing:

https://listmonk.app/

I’ve been thinking about messing around with it myself.
posted by Shepherd at 5:06 PM on June 26

Ask your university's IT department about LISTSERV. This is an older technology, it has been around since early mainframe days, but is still in use in a lot of places. Usually runs without a lot of fuss, so they may even forgotten it was there. One piece of software can manage many mailing lists; subscription/unsubscription and many other aspects are managed via commands sent via email. You send your message to a particular email address, and then all subscribers see it, and can reply. You can, in some cases, elect to receive a 'digest' per day (all of that day's messages in one email). Some instances also have a web page method of reading the messages.
posted by TimHare at 6:58 PM on June 26 [5 favorites]