Email Lists

[David Woolley]

On 06/10/2022 17:39, Brian Morrison wrote:
> Exactly like? So it's a mailing list manager...
> 

I've used it in a high volume context, where I make several posts a day, 
and it seems to me that many of the features only make sense as a web 
forum.  I haven't looked at email, except for its notifications of 
tagged messages, and replies to my postings.

The problem I'd have with pidgin as anything but pure email format would 
be that it is very low volume.  I don't like web sites being able to 
intrude, with notifications.

Typically, what I find with support forums, is that the people making 
one time appearances, to ask a question, prefer forums, because they are 
fashionable, but those who stick around and answer tend to prefer 
mailing lists.  However both mailing list and forum camps can have a 
serious amount of religious fervour.

The risk with forums in high volume cases, is that they fragment, 
because lots of people want to own their own forum.  Historically, at 
least, the reason for actually providing forum infrastructure was 
targetting, although the Discourse ones I'm on are only used to 
advertise the company owning the official version of the OS software.

Even if mailing lists fragment, you can use mail filters to put them 
back together, albeit you still run the risk of the same question 
getting asked on all of them, and the complete answer being spread 
across them.