Open Source Mailing Lists – Why You Should Sign Up

If you’ve got a website, an application or a server doing just about anything, chances are you’re running some open source software on it,  be it a web server like Apache, or an MTA like Courier.
You’ve been told that these pieces of crucial software are open source and have community support, and community driven development.  You look around for this ‘community’ and find some really old, poorly designed websites, documentation that hasn’t been touched in years, and ‘news’ posts that don’t have a lick of CSS used.

So where is this ‘community’, you might wonder.  Where are all these smart people making decisions and offering support and suggestions?  The likely answer is that they are hiding in a mailing list!

What Is A Mailing List And Why Do I Care?

A mailing list is one of the most widely used avenues projects utilize to communicate with  users and developers.  It’s convenient as everything happens via email allowing people to consume and participate using their normal workflow, and processed by a mailing list manager making real, in depth conversations possible, easily to follow, and archived for future reference.  There are two types of mailing lists, both of which you should sign up and participate for any project or software you use heavily in your cloud server deployments.
It should be noted that the type of content in these mailing lists are generally not spammy and distinguished from what we know as ‘newsletters’ which generally have some sort of promotional objective.

Announcement Lists

The first type is simple, and probably what you already imagine a mailing list to be.  A simple list of email addresses a person or organization will send a message to periodically with news, announcements, security updates, releases, and other updates.  This is a one way list and is generally referred to as ‘announce only’ lists that you subscribe to and consume information.
You should sign up for these announce only lists for most software you use.  Things like MySQL, Apache, your operating system, and your programming platform are a few examples of announce only mailing lists that can be beneficial.  You’ll be among the first to know about new releases, details, upcoming changes, and security issues depending on what the list manager decides to post.
If your infrastructure utilizes something like Apache in extremely crucial places, and it’s your job to manage the Apache installation, keep it patched, and stay ahead of the curve on new features and upcoming changes, you’ll have a hard time explaining to your boss why you’re not signed up for the Apache announcements list.

Discussion Mailing Lists

Discussion lists are what you should really pay attention to.  Discussion lists allow anyone to send a message to everyone that is subscribed, potentially thousands of people.  Think of how an internet forum might work, except completely in your inbox.
Anybody subscribed to the list can post to it by sending an email, which then creates what’s called a ‘thread’ based on the subject line.  Everyone else subscribed to the list will receive your message and can reply to you right from their inbox, sometimes by lead developers or the project founders themselves.  You’ll be surprised how active Linus Torvalds is on many mailing lists.
These types of discussion lists are great for asking support questions so long as you follow the guidelines and maintain certain etiquette.  These guidelines and etiquettes are important as you’re injecting yourself right into the inbox of many people.
What’s more interesting with these discussion lists is that you can gain a heap of knowledge just by subscribing and skimming through the messages on a daily or even a weekly basis.  You’ll find yourself reading about users working through unusual bugs and issues, and perhaps developers discussing implementation paths for new features.  All of which you can post a comment on if you’ve any thoughts on the subject.
Mailing lists are an easy way to fill up your inbox to an unusable state however.  With some lists you may receive a couple hundred emails a day and you might find it hard to get any value from them. So make sure you set up proper filters in your email client to keep your inbox clean and don’t feel you have to read every single message that comes through.
Here’s a  handful of mailing lists I think most readers of this blog will benefit from.  However, these are just a handful of examples and you should look into what lists are available for any software you use.

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