I had this same question in my mind — especially if one can reply to an email 
and it posts back to the forum.

The mailing list model works well for those who want to get the entire feed of 
traffic, and easily monitor which threads they want to follow/read using the 
standard affordances in their mail program (e.g., mail filters, flagging 
messages, and so on).

The forum interface provides a way for people to just jump in and participate 
on specific topics, provide better (standard) rendering of content — such as 
code (which can be nice for technical conversations), and better archiving and 
possibly be more searchable.

If Discourse supports participation via email, it seems we get the best of both 
worlds, as you say.  I'm not super familiar with what Discourse can do in this 
regards.

> On Jan 25, 2017, at 9:22 PM, Nevin Brackett-Rozinsky via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Can a forum be configured to send each new post to the mailing list with 
> proper subject line?
> 
> If so, that would enable a best-of-both-worlds scenario—or at least the 
> ability to dip our toes in a forum to see if it works, while still showing 
> everything on-list.
> 
> Nevin
> 
> 
> 
>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Chris Lattner via swift-evolution 
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Jan 25, 2017, at 6:57 PM, Xiaodi Wu <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>>>> Signing up for mailing lists is straightforward, yes—but that’s only a 
>>>>> small part of it. Signing up for a mailing list is a *commitment.* Once 
>>>>> you do it, your inbox will be inundated with mailing list posts, making 
>>>>> it difficult to find messages that actually have been intended for you 
>>>>> personally. Therefore, you’ll have to deal with that somehow. You can set 
>>>>> up rules in Mail to route mailing list posts to a separate folder, but 
>>>>> that won’t help you if you access your webmail from a public machine. 
>>>> 
>>>> FWIW, I subscribe to many mailing lists in gmail and have it auto filter 
>>>> emails to mailing lists into a separate mailbox (well, really, tags) for 
>>>> each list.  It works great for me.
>>>> 
>>>> This doesn’t detract from your point about it being a commitment though.
>>> 
>>> It does kind of imply a follow-up question, though: is it _undesirable_ 
>>> that signing up for a mailing list is a modicum of commitment?
>> 
>> I’m mixed on that.  On the one hand, it is great to have some level of 
>> commitment before people inject their opinion into the mix for some 
>> discussion.  OTOH, I’m sympathetic to the desire that a lot of people want 
>> to just “follow along” without participating, and the mailman web interface 
>> is pretty uninspired.
>> 
>> -Chris
>> 
>> 
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