Blog - /Tech

Gmane is a handy way to follow mailing lists, especially those with a large volume of messages. There are cases when it is not a good idea to use it, however.

Maintainers of a project should definitely not use it to follow mailing lists for their projects. The same goes for active contributors. The reasons are as follows.

1. If your main computer breaks down and you have to rely on just websites, you would have to visit the Gmane web interface for each mailing list that you're a part of. This would mean you can't easily keep track of which messages have been seen, and becomes a hassle if you're involved in several projects.
2. More things can go wrong. Most people use something like leafnode to download messages from Gmane. I recently ran into a bug where leafnode was not fetching messages for any newsgroups (after about three weeks of being without internet access) until each newsgroup was visited and had all of its messages read. I just don't have time to investigate such things.
3. If your mailing list has a policy of sending replies both to individual senders and the list itself, this is nontrivial to do.