Gmane

Gmane
OwnerYomura
Created byLars Magne Ingebrigtsen
URLgmane.io
Launched2002
Current statusMoved to news.gmane.io

Gmane (pronounced "mane") is an e-mail to news gateway. It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, 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; 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, a newsreader for Emacs. It began operating publicly on 11 February 2002 after a one-month test period.

As of 18 February 2012, 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.[1][2] 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.[3][4] On the 6 September 2016, it was announced that the Gmane web interface would be coming online again.[5] However, by February 2018 a LWN.net 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."[6]

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.[7] 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.[8] It is currently available only by newsreader as the website formerly operated by Yomura has not been recreated.

  1. ^ Ingebrigtsen, Lars (2016-07-28). "The End of Gmane?". Random Thoughts. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  2. ^ Edge, Jake (2016-07-28). "Ingebrigtsen: The End of Gmane?". Lwn.net. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  3. ^ Danko, Martin (2016-08-29). "Next Steps for Gmane". home.gmane.org. Archived from the original on 2020-10-24. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  4. ^ ris (2016-09-06). "Danko: Next steps for Gmane". Lwn.net. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  5. ^ Ingebrigtsen, Lars (2016-09-06). "Gmane Alive!". Random Thoughts. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  6. ^ Corbet, Jonathan (2018-02-28). "Creating an email archive with public-inbox". LWN.net. Archived from the original on 2018-04-06. Retrieved 2018-05-02.
  7. ^ Ingebrigtsen, Lars (2020-01-06). "Whatever Happened To news.gmane.org?". Random Thoughts. Retrieved 16 January 2020.
  8. ^ Ingebrigtsen, Lars (2020-01-15). "news.gmane.org is now news.gmane.io". Random Thoughts. Retrieved 16 January 2020.