Gmane (pronounced "mane") is an

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

to news gateway. It allows users to access

electronic mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is re ...

s as if they were

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct ...

s, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Since Gmane is a bidirectional gateway, it can also be used to post on the mailing lists. Gmane is an

archive An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...

; it never expires messages (unless explicitly requested by users). Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service. The project was initiated in 2001 by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen, one of the authors of

Gnus Gnus (), or Gnus Network User Services, is a message reader which is part of GNU Emacs. It supports reading and composing both e-mail and news and can also act as an RSS reader, web processor, and directory browser for both local and remote files ...

, a newsreader for

Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

. It began operating publicly on 11 February 2002 after a one-month test period. , Gmane's homepage stated that it included 129,592,482 messages in its archives, from a total of 20,070 mailing lists. In July 2016, Ingebrigtsen announced that he was considering shutting Gmane down, and the web interface was taken offline. In August 2016 Gmane was acquired by Yomura Holdings. Only the message spool was transferred, with the software behind the site having to be redeveloped. On the 6 September 2016, it was announced that the Gmane web interface would be coming online again. However, by February 2018 a

LWN.net LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to ...

article observed that the web interface did "never ..return, breaking thousands of links across the net. The front page still says 'some things are very broken' and links to a blog page that was last updated in September 2016." In January 2020, the server hosting the e-mail to news service, still operated by Ingebrigtsen, needed to be moved following the sale of a company Ingebrigtsen had co-founded. Due to failure of the current owners of gmane.org to update a DNS entry — resulting in the unavailability of news.gmane.org — Ingebrigtsen obtained a replacement domain, gmane.io, and migrated the 15,000 mailing lists to a new server at the new address using a combination of automation, volunteer labor, and manual processes. It is currently available only by newsreader as the website formerly operated by Yomura has not been recreated.

Example

wikien-l is an electronic mailing list for discussion concerning the English-language Wikipedia. Via the standard email interface, users post messages by emailing them to wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org, and these are forwarded by email to everyone who subscribes to the list. Gmane permits users to access this mailing list as if it were a Usenet newsgroup instead, by using the

news server A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server providers. Articles and ...

news.gmane.io and group name gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english. Messages posted to the list by email will appear in the Gmane newsgroup, and vice versa.

Spam protection

Incoming mail is checked by

SpamAssassin Apache SpamAssassin is a computer program used for anti-spam techniques, e-mail spam filtering. It uses a variety of spam-detection techniques, including Domain Name System, DNS and fuzzy checksum techniques, Bayesian spam filtering, Bayesian filt ...

and

anti-virus software Antivirus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name. ...

so that

spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...

and

viruses A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1 ...

are hidden or deleted. Outgoing mail is checked by

TMDA TMDA is an open-source software application designed to reduce the amount of junk email a user receives. TMDA's main difference from other anti-spam systems is the use of a challenge/response system that bulk mailing machines and programs are eit ...

to make sure that no spam will be posted to the lists using Gmane.

Other list-archiving services

Other services which can archive mailing lists include The Mail Archive, Nabble, MarkMail, MARC, MailBrowse, the old

Google Groups Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. The Groups service also provides a gateway to Usenet newsgroups via a shared user interface. Google Groups became operational in February ...

user interface (the interface which was standard until 2012), Gossamer Threads, and OpenSubscriber.

References

{{Reflist

External links

GmaneGmane's complete list of hosted lists
*Gmane is built on free software
downloadable here
Webmail Electronic mailing lists Usenet clients