eGroups Dumped

Over the coming weeks the iosphere and iosphere-dev mailing lists, which have been introduced for Iosphere support and development, will be migrated from eGroups to Topica.

In August 2000 eGroups "merged" (it was really a take-over) with Yahoo! to add yet another feature to the Yahoo! empire. It was only a matter of time before eGroups became Yahoo! Groups - something which many eGroups users were dreading. Exactly what was feared now seems to have happened - eGroups wants to associate the eGroups account (which may contain a corporate email address) with a Yahoo! account. Of course for some people this means creating a new account, but with so many users a useful username is hard to find.

Rather than creating a new Yahoo! Groups service and leaving the excellent eGroups service intact, the latter has been replaced. This is likely to lose a lot of users - most likely to Topica, who offer a similar (if slightly less functional) service.

In an attempt to protect the Iosphere and Iosphere-Dev mailing lists from any undesirable changes, they will be moved to Topica pending a review - ideally we would like to offer our own mailing lists.

This decision has been taken mainly as a result of disgust at the rapid expansion of Yahoo! and their contempt for the existing eGroups users.