Migration of lists.ipfire.org to mlmmj & public-inbox

Migration of lists.ipfire.org to mlmmj & public-inbox

[Michael Tremer]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to inform you that lists.ipfire.org <http://lists.ipfire.org/> has been migrated from mailman 3 to mlmmj [1] and public-inbox [2]. This change was necessary due to long-standing issues with Mailman, including excessive resource usage and reliability concerns.

This email is already (and hopefully) reaching you over the new software. If you have not been able to receive this and other emails, please let me know. Everything else should pretty much be working without any further problems or changes.

Why all of this?

Mailman 3 seems to have a lot of problems that have been causing a lot of time to be dealt with. Although we have some workarounds in place here or there, they are neither pretty, nor do they help us to process emails swift and properly. The huge colossus that mailman 3 has become due to its split into multiple micro services has not only been pain for us.

Therefore I started looking for alternatives. However, email does not seem to be considered very cool any more. So there is a lot of commercial products that try to re-invent it, but actually behind those large lists that we have in the open source community, there seems to be one single software that is the chosen solution: mlmmj. Although I don’t know how to pronounce this name, it is a really neat piece of software. Super small. Written in C. Actively maintained again. And it can shift a lot of emails very fast. However, it does not have any kind of web UI. Which we don’t even need.

But I would like a public archive that can be searched through easily. That is implemented using another piece of software called public-inbox. All emails that go through the lists are being passed to public-inbox, indexed and can be viewed on the web in the old place:

  https://lists.ipfire.org/

My outstanding issue right now is simply making old links that pointed to mailman 2 and 3 work. I think we might have the problem that they won’t. But that will have to be a story for another day…

All the best,
-Michael

[1] https://mlmmj.org/
[2] https://public-inbox.org/

Re: Migration of lists.ipfire.org to mlmmj & public-inbox

[Michael Tremer]

Hello everyone,

A quick update on this…

So far, no new problems have been reported back to me on this, which is good news. Emails seem to be making their way to all recipients a lot faster now and the server is using significantly less resources now.

I have therefore removed all sorts of traces of Mailman 3 from the system which concludes the entire migration.

One last thing on my list was to fix any kinds of redirects. This has also been implemented now, but with the caveat that we cannot do this for Mailman 3 as the message ID in the URL is hashed. Public-inbox on the other hand requires the raw message ID. There is a way to index all emails and keep a table with the hashes somewhere, but that is simply too much work for very few people to benefit from. I also think that we have not been using Mailman 3 for long enough that there should be too many links around.

For Mailman 2, we can however redirect all emails which is the vast majority of links that I could find.

-Michael

> On 10 Mar 2025, at 11:31, Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I wanted to inform you that lists.ipfire.org <http://lists.ipfire.org/> has been migrated from mailman 3 to mlmmj [1] and public-inbox [2]. This change was necessary due to long-standing issues with Mailman, including excessive resource usage and reliability concerns.
> 
> This email is already (and hopefully) reaching you over the new software. If you have not been able to receive this and other emails, please let me know. Everything else should pretty much be working without any further problems or changes.
> 
> Why all of this?
> 
> Mailman 3 seems to have a lot of problems that have been causing a lot of time to be dealt with. Although we have some workarounds in place here or there, they are neither pretty, nor do they help us to process emails swift and properly. The huge colossus that mailman 3 has become due to its split into multiple micro services has not only been pain for us.
> 
> Therefore I started looking for alternatives. However, email does not seem to be considered very cool any more. So there is a lot of commercial products that try to re-invent it, but actually behind those large lists that we have in the open source community, there seems to be one single software that is the chosen solution: mlmmj. Although I don’t know how to pronounce this name, it is a really neat piece of software. Super small. Written in C. Actively maintained again. And it can shift a lot of emails very fast. However, it does not have any kind of web UI. Which we don’t even need.
> 
> But I would like a public archive that can be searched through easily. That is implemented using another piece of software called public-inbox. All emails that go through the lists are being passed to public-inbox, indexed and can be viewed on the web in the old place:
> 
>  https://lists.ipfire.org/
> 
> My outstanding issue right now is simply making old links that pointed to mailman 2 and 3 work. I think we might have the problem that they won’t. But that will have to be a story for another day…
> 
> All the best,
> -Michael
> 
> [1] https://mlmmj.org/
> [2] https://public-inbox.org/