Retiring the tools mailing list

[Andrew Halberstadt]

As many of you know, Mozilla is turning off its mailing list infrastructure
and lists are migrating either to Google Groups or Discourse. Rather than
migrate, I've made the decision to retire to...@lists.mozilla.org for the
following reasons:

1. Super low traffic. In the year 2020 there were only 6 posts. Three of
which were cross-posted elsewhere and two that looked like they were posted
to the wrong place.

2. Ambiguous purpose. The term "tools" means a lot of things to a lot of
people. Even when there was a moderate amount of traffic the posts were
always all over the place and it was always unclear whether the posts were
reaching intended audiences or not.

3. Better alternatives exist. Most of the "tools" oriented domains (e.g
build system, vcs, browser instrumentation, Taskcluster / CI) have their
own mailing lists where the people who have opinions are actually
subscribed. It's better to post questions to these lists directly rather
than a vague general purpose one like this. If we find a certain domain is
lacking a public discussion forum, we can create a purpose driven list on
Google Groups or Discourse to support that need.

Thanks for your understanding and thanks to the tools list for its years of
service.
Regards,
Andrew