tinylist

tinylist

tinylist is a lightweight mailing list manager written in Go. It's easy to deploy, and easy to manage. It was written as an antithesis of the experience of setting up other mailing list software.

Usage

tinylist is controlled by emailing tinylist with a command in the subject.

The following commands are available:

• help - Reply with a list of valid commands
• lists - Reply with a list of available mailing lists
• subscribe list-id - Subscribe to receive mail sent to the given list
• unsubscribe list-id - Unsubscribe from receiving mail sent to the given list

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a web interface?

No. If you'd like an online browsable archive of emails, I recommend looking into tools such as hypermail, which generate HTML archives from a list of emails.

If you'd like to advertise the lists on your website, it's recommended to do that manually, in whatever way looks best. Subscribe buttons can be achieved with a mailto: link.

How do I integrate this with my preferred mail transfer agent?

I'm only familiar with postfix, for which there are instructions below. The gist of it is: have your mail server pipe emails for any mailing list addresses to tinylist message. tinylist will handle any messages sent to it this way, and reply using the configured SMTP server.

Why would anyone want this?

Some people prefer mailing lists for patch submission and review, some people want to play mailing-list based games such as nomic, and some people are just nostalgic.

Installation

First, you'll need to build and install the tinylist binary: go get github.com/eXeC64/tinylist

Second, you'll need to write a config to either /etc/tinylist.ini or /usr/local/etc/tinylist.ini as follows:

You can also specify a custom config file location by invoking tinylist with the -config flag: -config=/path/to/config.ini

# File for event and error logging. tinylist does not rotate its logs
# automatically. Recommended path is /var/log/mail/tinylist
# You'll need to set permissions on it depending on which account your MTA
# runs tinylist as.
log = /path/to/logfile

# An sqlite3 database is used for storing the email addresses subscribed to
# each mailing list. Recommended location is /var/db/tinylist.db
# You'll need to set permissions on it depending on which account your MTA
# runs tinylist as.
database = /path/to/sqlite/database

[bot]
# Address tinylist should receive user commands on
command_address = lists@example.com

# SMTP details for sending mail
smtp_hostname = "smtp.example.com"
smtp_port = 25
smtp_username = "tinylist"
smtp_password = "hunter2"

Create a list by invoking

tinylist create --list=golang@example.com --name="Go programming" --description="General discussion of Go programming" --bcc archive@example.com --bcc datahoarder@example.com
tinylist create --list=announce@example.com --name="Announcements" --description="Important announcements" --poster admin@example.com --poster moderator@example.com
tinylist create --list=robertpaulson99@example.com --name "fight club" --flag subscribers_only --flag hidden

Lastly, you need to hook the desired incoming addresses to tinylist:

In /etc/aliases:

tinylist: "| /path/to/bin/tinylist message"

And run newaliases for the change to take effect.

This creates an alias that pipes messages sent to the tinylist alias to the tinylist command.

The final step is telling your preferred MTA to route mail to this address when needed.

For postfix edit /etc/postfix/aliases and add:

lists@example.com tinylist
golang@example.com tinylist
announce@example.com tinylist
robertpaulson99@example.com tinylist

and restart postfix.

Congratulations, you've now set up 3 mailing lists of your own!

License

tinylist is made available under the BSD-3-Clause license.