Over the years most of our competitors have consolidated or shuttered their services, leaving the communities they host in search of a new home, and happily many of them come to FreeLists. Here are some commonly asked questions about how to migrate.

FreeLists provides mailing list services, plain and simple. You email [email protected] and we send your post out to everyone subscribed. We offer archives, digest mode, vacation mode, post moderation, and all the usual things you expect from such a service.

We don't allow list admins to directly add subscribers to their lists. While this sounds like a drag this limitation is there to prevent SPAM, allow us to establish consent and protect privacy, and to improve our overall quality of service.

There's one exception though: list migrations! When migrating from another service you've already established consent with your subscribers. We can import for you automatically with little effort, just email your text, CSV, or other common format export to staff@freelists.org. This is a one-time thing geared toward migrations though: new subscribers thereafter go through the normal subscribe process.

Yes! At FreeLists we consider open, searchable, permanent archives to be a key offering and we don't want you to lose your community's history when you migrate.

“mbox” is the preferred transfer format and it's the most commonly used mailbox storage format out there, making this a straightforward process. We can work up custom imports for other formats too, but mbox makes it easy. Zip those up and send them our way and we can maintain your archive uninterrupted in perpetuity!

On December 15, 2020, Yahoo Groups is fully shutting down. All of the above applies to them but we have two additional resources related to archive migration. To get those mbox files over to us, here are two options known to work:

A python script

A Chrome extension

Email staff@freelists.org to get the process started.