The Exotica Music Mailing List 05 May 1994 – 10 March 2017

Moritz suggested I  write a few details about what happened to the original Exotica list. With a resurgent interest about it on Facebook at Once upon a time there was the marvelous Exotica Mailinglist. It was even recommended we start it up again.

I got admin rights to the Mailing list on the Xmission server in March 2011. At that time called XMission to find out what the deal was on hosting. And they established an account and I started paying $3 a month for mailing list hosting.  The mailing list was pretty much dying without an active admin to approve new members. Facebook was coming up and I tried to improve the settings on the list, allowing pictures for instance.

Xmission told me they considered mailman a “legacy product" and were not supporting it.   Which may explain the vague comments from some list members about how the service was not working. Mailing lists are still a very active, reliable and useful method of communicating. The software "Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager" is still being updated.

So in February of 2017 a list member offered to move the mailing list and all the archived messages to a new server.  A fresh start with an IT professional who cared about the list and updated software.  I personally botched the "less than optimal" transition in multiple ways. With unwanted invites, a password SNAFU and setting off security flags at XMISSON.

So I am sorry for destroyed the Mailing list. Tried to resurrect it and move it forward.

Suspended the mailing list in March 2017. We had ~200 members on the daily email  and just over 300 receiving the digest.

The good news is I have all  180Mb’s of text files preserved between 1994 and 2017. The Exotica Mailing list archives are saved and ready to be reactivated on a new server. Or just archived somewhere, maybe for free at archive.org or some other location.

The Facebook group is a continuation of an earlier mailing list. Where at this writing we have just over 8500 members.

I agree with Moritz that the list was a marvelous place. 

Domenic.