Here someone wrote it better than me, on the VLC mailing list http://pastehtml.com/view/cfnt9o362.txt
I would add: -No captcha to solve anywhere to join a mailing list. - No separate user-password to remember on a mailing list. - You can read it anywhere you can get e-mail - You don´t have to conciously go "fetch" or "look at" anything. Email arrives "automagically" to your inbox. - no waiting for forum web pages to load, no adverts, no footers, no colors, no graphical sig files, no animated gifs to look at, no delay to "log-in", messages just arrive to your mailbox - Easy archival (just set a rule and archive your list email to a given subfolder, or a given label if using GMail) - Reply speed (many people´s work day involves reading and replying to e-mail. A mailing list ensures messages with catch the interest of the reader are clicked on and read immediately, or much faster then when "visiting a web forum once a day". - Sense of community: participating on a any mailing list for a period of time helps breed a community feeling. Avtivity on web forums is much more sparse... many people just join a forum to ask a question, and when given an answer that suits them, they rarely return... they do not "engage" as often as members of a mailing list. - in part due to the above, it´s much easier to deal with troublemakers, spammers and trolls etc on a mailing list (just ban his email address) than on web forums. -web based forums are more prone to spam than mailing lists (even with the implementation of captcha for registration by many popular web forums software) -web forums are part of the involution of the Net... (imho) Just my $0.02 FC -- During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act - George Orwell
