Gmane is an e-mail

E-mail

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 to news gateway. It allows users to access electronic mailing list

Electronic mailing list

An electronic mailing list is a special usage of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list — a list of names and addresses — as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to...

s as if they were Usenet

Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 newsgroup

Newsgroup

A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...

s, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Gmane is an archive

Archive

An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...

; 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.

Incoming mail is checked by SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is a computer program released under the Apache License 2.0 used for e-mail spam filtering based on content-matching rules. It is now part of the Apache Foundation....

 and anti-virus software so that spam and viruses

Computer virus

A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...

 are hidden or deleted. Since Gmane is a bidirectional gateway, you can also post on the mailing lists. Outgoing mail is checked by TMDA to make sure that no spam will be posted to the lists using Gmane.

The project was initiated in 2001 by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen, one of the authors of Gnus

Gnus

Gnus is a message reader running under GNU Emacs and XEmacs. It supports reading and composing both news and e-mail.Gnus blurs the distinction between news and e-mail, treating them both as "articles" that come from different sources. News articles are kept separate by group, and e-mail can be...

, a newsreader for Emacs

Emacs

Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...

. It began operating publicly on 11 February 2002 after a one-month test period.

, Gmane's homepage boasts inclusion of 101,561,494 messages in its archives, from a total of 14,187 mailing lists.

Example

The WikiEN-l mailing list is an electronic mailing list for discussion concerning the English-language Wikipedia

English Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...

. 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

News server

A news server is a set of computer software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. A reader server provides an interface to read and post articles, generally with the assistance of a news client. A transit...

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

• If you have newsreader software configured, you can access the Gmane interface of the WikiEN-l list at: news://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english.
• You can view the Gmane interface of the WikiEN-l list via the web at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english.

External links

• Gmane
• Gmane's complete list of hosted lists (Note: may be slow to load)
• Gmane is built on free software - downloadable here