Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy

So let me get this straight. Your big pitch is "Sharing privately with groups is broken right now ... Multi-attachment, inbox-cluttering emails."<p>And you're solving that problem (a few sentences later) with "Every time you post to the group, she'll receive the full content as an email. She can reply directly to your email and everyone in the group gets her update."<p>How exactly does that solve any inbox-clutter problems whatsoever? If anything, it seems like it'd create even more inbox clutter. Am I missing something here? Sending more emails results in less clutter?

This would have been more interesting and innovative a couple years ago, but now that everyone and their mother (and grandmother, and grandfather) are on Facebook, I think Facebook Groups is a fine solution that offers all the features listed here.<p>I had this exact problem twice in the last month, and both times, I found that everyone in the two real-world groups I was trying to bring online was already on Facebook. Literally every single person out of maybe 50 people total, spanning age ranges from teenagers to folks in their late 50s. I found it much easier to get them to use it than it would have been if I had to explain this new posterous thing.

I just tried it. It works well as a replacement for Google Wave - but it's nicer. Also, the emails means that there is instant notifications, which was a flaw that gwave had.

If I send a HTML email to a group which contains an iframe, an img tag, and an input field of type "image", all referencing a remote URL, the process of viewing the email in the posterous interface automatically causes the browser to fetch each of those resources.<p>This is a privacy leak. You should remove references to these remote resources when displaying a message in the posterous web interface. You should then provide an option to "Load Remote Images". Much like most email clients do.

You have a tracking image embedded in the emails. It points at a redirector script which does no validation of the destination url. This is highly abusable. Example:<p><a href="http://r.posterous.com/track/?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2F" rel="nofollow">http://r.posterous.com/track/?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.c...</a>

Cool. What is Posterous's business model?

Bug: I already had a posterous account, and whenever I try to create a new group it just sends me in circles and breaks. :-(

Two questions:<p>- Can groups be members of other groups?<p>- In gmail when I click "reply" to a mail sent to the group, it just goes back to the sender (there is a "Reply To" visible in the mail, but gmail isn't using it for some reason).<p>Otherwise, neat stuff. Not everybody in my family is on Facebook, and others in the family are leery of using FB because of privacy issues (unintentional information sharing between friend circles).

And when does this gang plan to make some money? I fail to see a business model taking form.

I love the way you've made this work. However, it does not behave well with PGP signed emails. When a message is MIME/PGP signed, the attachment is stripped and dropped. When a message is signed inline, posterous corrupts the message leaving the header in place, but dropping the signature. If this is fixed, I am likely to use this service for some technical lists.

How is this different to frid.ge or neetly.com?

Maybe its the WikiLeaks debacle lately, but somehow my first thoughts were "cool, like that" and then "i cant use it, because i cant trust posterous with my data"..

Genuine question. How is this better than Yahoo Groups?

If it doesn't require confirmation from group members, how do they stop spammers from abusing it?

Can a person join an existing Posterous Group using only email?

Wow I had the idea to do exactly this only a few days ago.

Why would someone use this over google groups?

Hmmm... is this slinkset's successor?

You guys beat me to it (launching something similar this week). Very nice, indeed.