[amsat-bb] Slack vs. eMail -- The medium is the message

[Joseph B. Fitzgerald]

Ken,  VA7KBM wrote:
>... AMSAT should consider a more modern email list system. 

Presently the IT crew is working on migrating our servers off the existing Linux distribution which goes end-of-life in November to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.    This will result in a change to GNU Mailman 3.0 ... more modern but not exactly a quantum leap.   Now would be a great time for a fleshed out proposal for something else since it would be hard on the users to switch again in another year or whatever.   I have looked at groups.io a little bit in the past, and it seems to be run by "good guys".    Don't wait for "AMSAT" to consider alternatives, you guys are AMSAT, so put together a good proposal and convince people.

> ... It's generally not a good idea
>for most small organizations to run their own email servers these days -
>too much security and technical overhead, and who needs that?

I surely don't need that and I am one of they guys that directly deals with that overhead.   That being said, an issue that trips me up every time I look at having someone else run things is the e-mail alias service we provide to anyone with a callsign.    We have somewhere around 16,000 users of that service and I know of no economically viable way to do that except on our own servers.

de KM1P Joe