New Video: Creating a Mailing List with Google Groups

Video Link

For the first time, in 2 years, I have posted a new video on my YouTube channel!

This video is about a personal curiosity of mine: mailing lists. I’ve never used mailing lists but I’ve seen them used before for different software development projects, primarily the Linux Kernel. But many other pieces of software are developed with mailing lists. So in this video, to celebrate the fact I got OBS working, I decided to just hit record and start trying it out myself.

What I Learned

• Mailing lists can be created with Google Groups for free. (It appears) that one user can create an unlimited amount of groups.
• To subscribe to a group, send an email addressed to groupname+subscribe@googlegroups.com (to unsubscribe, just do groupname+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com)
• An email sent to a mailing list is sent to every member of the list

My Email Setup

Something I also wanted to write about is my email setup. Gmail lets you use POP and IMAP as well as SMTP for your Gmail. Finally, yoou should use an app password (you need 2FA to be turned on) for this setup, but I’ve heard of people doing it with Oauth.

The simplest email client (and the one I ended up choosing is mutt.

To configure mutt with Gmail, write this into the ~/.muttrc file:

set ssl_starttls=yes
set ssl_force_tls=yes

set imap_user = '<email>'
set imap_pass = '<app password>'

set from='<email>'
set realname='<real name>'

set folder = "imaps://imap.gmail.com/"
set spoolfile = "imaps://imap.gmail.com/INBOX"
set postponed="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Drafts"
set record="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Sent Mail"
set copy=no

set header_cache = "~/.mutt/cache/headers"
set message_cachedir = "~/.mutt/cache/bodies"
set certificate_file = "~/.mutt/certificates"

set smtp_url = 'smtps://<email>:<app password>@smtp.gmail.com:465/'

set move = no
set imap_keepalive = 900

Appendix: Getting OBS Working

Basically, the steps I took to get OBS working were the following:

1. Downloading OBS: Use the AUR build and ignore the warning about it being X86-only
2. Download xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
3. Start xdg-desktop-portal whenever sway is running:

exec dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd WAYLAND_DISPLAY DISPLAY SWAYSOCK XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=sway
exec --no-startup-id /usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal -r

(~/.config/sway/config)

4. Start OBS

This seems simple but it was after quite a lot of trial and error.