[Imports] Decommission this mailing list

[Christoph Hormann]

> michael spreng <talk at osm.datendelphin.net> hat am 13.06.2025 geschrieben:
> 
> The OpenStreetMap Community forum has a mailinglist like interface 
> enabled, which works well enough.

Not really.  The so called mailing list mode of discourse presents email users with a different reality than those using the web interface and does not provide an archive for the email version of reality.  In short: email users are second class citizens in discourse.  And this is not incidental, this is by design.

Not to mention that if you'd want to selectively subscribe to different channels with different email addresses things get really complicated.

Ah - and did i mention that the forum seems to silently auto-unsubscribe email users who have not logged in to the web interface for a longer time?

But all of that does not matter of course in the end.  The OSMF has decided a long time ago that they want to get rid of the mailing lists.  While nothing is shut down forcibly so far there is clearly no long term perspective for mailing lists on OSMF infrastructure any more and this has been clear for years.  So if parts of the OSM community want to continue using this medium (and i completely concur that this would be beneficial for the community) they will need to find a different way to host such lists.

Greetings,

--
Christoph Hormann
https://www.imagico.de/