I have recently migrated my primary email address to my own domain and started using it for all communication purposes. One of the main thing is to subscribe to various Google Groups which GNU/Linux User’s Groups under FSMK have. The straight forward way, you would think, would be to just search for the groups in groups.google.com website, then there should be a subscribe button where you would enter your email address and then you should receive a email to confirm that you want to subscribe. This is what most of the mailing lists software would do. However not Google Groups. If you want to subscribe to Google Groups, when you click to join the group, it asks you to sign in a Google Account, hence any non-google account wont be able to subscribe to a group.
The other way is to request the group admins to add your email address in the group, this will not work always as most of the times I wouldnt even know the admins of the group. Also it means that you now have to depend on the other person to find time to add you which will be slow. Idea of public mailing lists is that anyone interested should be able to subscribe. Unfortunately google does a reasonable job in ensuring it becomes very difficult for you unless you have a Google Account.
So I found out a more difficult way to subscribe/unsubscribe google groups and this is again borrowed from traditional mailing lists softwares.
If you know the google group’s mailing address, say
glugdsce@googlegroups.com
You can subscribe to the group, by sending a mail to
glugdsce+subscribe@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe, send a mail to
glugdsce+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
Similarly, to directly visit the page of the group in a browser, you can use the following link
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/glugdsce
In all above cases, just remove glugdsce with the name of the group that you are interested in.
Overall, I think Google Groups continue the evils of Google and if you are a well established group/community, it is always better to host your own mailing list and move out of Google Groups as soon as possible.
