Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list to friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area.

[8] Having observed people helping one another in friendly, social, and trusting communal ways on the Internet via the WELL, MindVox and Usenet, and feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something similar for local events.

Most of the early postings were submitted by Newmark and were notices of social events of interest to software and Internet developers living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The initial technology encountered some limits, so by June 1995 Majordomo had been installed, and the mailing list "Craigslist" resumed operations.

[9] Around the time of these events, Newmark realized the site was growing so fast that he could stop working as a software engineer and devote his full attention to running Craigslist.

Buckmaster contributed to the site's multi-city architecture, search engine, discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature.

[15] Some Craigslist sites cover large regions instead of individual metropolitan areas—for example, the U.S. states of Delaware and Wyoming, the Colorado Western Slope, the California Gold Country, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

[18][19] The 23 largest U.S. cities listed on the Craigslist home page collectively receive more than 300,000 postings per day just in the "for sale" and "housing" sections as of October 2011.

As of January 2024[update], there have been no substantive changes to the usefulness or the non-advertising nature of the site; neither banner ads, nor charges for a few services provided to businesses.

[32][33] On June 19, 2015, eBay Inc. announced that it would divest its stake back to Craigslist for an undisclosed amount, and settle its litigation with the company.

[32] The Swedish luxury marketplace website Jameslist.com received a lawsuit filed on July 11, 2012,[34] which among unspecified damages also asked for a complete shutdown of Jameslist.com [35] As a consequence, the young company was forced to rename to JamesEdition.

As of 2012, mashup sites such as padmapper.com and housingmaps.com were overlaying Craigslist data with Google Maps and adding their own search filters to improve usability.

[40][41][43][44] The site was considered particularly useful by lesbians and gay men seeking to make connections, because of the service's free and open nature and because of the difficulty of otherwise finding each other in more conservative areas.

The service stated that US Congress just passed HR 1865, 'FOSTA', seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully.

The site received criticism and complaints from attorneys general that the section's ads were facilitating prostitution and child sex trafficking.

Brian Carver, attorney and assistant professor at UC Berkeley, said that legal threats could have a chilling effect on online expression.

[60][61][62][63][64] On December 19, 2010, after pressure from Ottawa and several provinces, Craigslist closed 'Erotic Services' and 'Adult Gigs' from its Canadian website, even though prostitution was not itself illegal in Canada at the time.

[65] When the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act was signed into law on April 11, 2018, Craigslist chose to close its "Personals" section within all US domains to avoid civil lawsuits.

In "advanced fee fraud" the seller tricks the buyer's into making an unsecured (i.e. not via a credit card or another legitimate escrow service) payment before receiving the product/service.

In its defense Craigslist successfully used Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act (CDA), which states that websites cannot be held liable for the actions of their users.

In July 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle criticized Craigslist for allowing ads from dog breeders, stating that this could encourage the over-breeding and irresponsible selling of pit bulls in the Bay Area.

[77] In addition to allowing illegal activities and to poor customer protection, Craigslist has been numerous times accused of unfair competition.

[citation needed] For example, in January 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian published an editorial claiming that Craigslist could threaten the business of local alternative newspapers.

[78] L. Gordon Crovitz, writing for The Wall Street Journal, criticized the company for using lawsuits "to prevent anyone from doing to it what it did to newspapers", contrary to the spirit of the website, which describes itself as a "noncommercial nature, public service mission, and noncorporate culture".

Craigslist filed a trademark lawsuit against the Swedish luxury marketplace website Jameslist.com on July 11, 2012,[80] forcing the company to rename to JamesEdition.

[37] In 2001, the company started the Craigslist Foundation,[81] a § 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that offered free and low-cost events and online resources to promote community building at all levels.