I just set up a new mailing list for Meditation, with this great service called FreeLists

a service providing free, commercial-grade Internet mailing lists to all interested. Our lists are all internet and technology-related. Thus, we provide a free focal point for technology-inclined individuals and groups on the Internet. We do it all without the support of advertisements, ensuring the highest-quality mailing list experience for you and your users.

And let me tell you, this service is awesome. Granted, I have only just started using the service so I am hesitant to write a full review (lets wait till the honey moon is over) but I already have some good things to say.

First of all, mailing list management can be done either through email (through some cryptic commands) or through a web interface. The web interface seems a little klunky (it isn't easy to use) but full featured (every option to the mailing list software is covered). For better and worse, it seems to be a front-end interface to everything inside Ecartis (the mailing list software). What this means is pure, un-restrained power and control is given to the user. What it also means is a lot of head-scratching about the options. Luckily the freelist people provide some useful defaults, and good help files.

Now we get into the funkiness. Each list has its own web-page like this one for Meditation. The subscribe-via-the-web is a nice and handy addition. As you can see, each list has an archives section, which is viewable by date and/or thread and searchable. And perhaps best of all, each list is given an RSS feed of the last 16 posts. This is hella cool, allowing you to integrate your latest postings on the mailing list with... well... anything. Your RSS reader, your wiki, your blog... the possibilities are wide open.

In the future, I may just switch over to mailing list software I can control on my own server, especially if I find I need an announce list, user list, developer list, and CVS commit list. For now however, having these guys manage it and not having to worry about uptime, configuration and security updates is a-ok with me.