AOL To Discontinue LISTSERV

alphadogg writes "On December 1, AOL will shut down its free LISTSERV-based mailing-list hosting operations, the company has told mailing list administrators. 'If your list is still actively used, please make arrangements to find another service prior to the shutdown date and notify your list members of the transition details,' an email notice sent out by AOL stated. At the peak of the service's popularity in the late 1990s, AOL was the third-largest provider of mailing lists, serving more than a million users."

Loss of archives is going to be bad

[JoshuaZ]

From TFA:

ne list still somewhat active is the discussion list for AOLserver, AOL's open-source Web server software. The administrator for this list moved it to SourceForge, where the AOLserver code is housed. However, the administrator, Dossy Shiobara, noted that there was no immediate way to move the decadelong archives of this mailing list, along with related announcement lists, to SourceForge. Fortunately, much of the content is mirrored on other sites, however.

Not all of the lists are going to have their archives mirrored. This is going to mean that a fair bit of internet history is going to get lost, and contribute a decent amount of linkrot in the process. While I suspect that most of that will just be inane flamewars, it always saddens me when data that could be preserved isn't preserved. I do hope that someone finds a way to move the archives of the various lists somewhere.

Re:Converting from LISTSERV

[corbettw]

Check and see if fetchmail can handle it, it does some converting from mail box types to others. Also, procmail might work for you.

Just make sure you don't accidentally start sending out those old messages all over again. Probably best to do the work offline, just to be safe.

Re:This is huge news!

[Chrisq]

I remember AOL UK suggesting that the towns Scunthorpe and Pensitone change their names [independent.co.uk] to Socnthorpe and Pennistone because people could not register using them (they caught in the primitive obscenity filter). The absolute anger of citizens of these towns was really amusing I remember one person pointing out that thir town was much older than America, let alone America Online and they were buggered if they would change their name.

Another classic of cultural insensitivity was when they told people on the Wales regional forum that they had to post in English and Welsh was banned!