Ethan Furman writes:
It seems to me the best possible outcome of Discourse vs email is somebody / some company donating the time and/or funding to improve Discourse's and Mailman's abilities to interoperate with each other.
There are fundamental differences between email's aysnchronous message streams and Discourse's enforced single message stream. These can't be perfectly reconciled, despite how fast email can be nowadays. Since Mailman (and its users!) expects messages to arrive asynchronously and handles that using threading information, as far as I can see the Mailman side is handled as well as it can be now that Discourse provides threading information, and you just subscribe Mailman to Discourse. And obviously we can just sign up Discourse to Mailman. The latter direction may be harder, depending on whether Discourse can make sense of batches of messages being composed independently of its message flow. The fact that Discourse didn't provide threading information to email users in the past suggest that it has an alternative mechanism for organizing mail flows, and message IDs and Reference headers from email may not be so easily integrated. I know nothing about Discourse internals, but I suspect that's going to be the difficult part if there is one. With a little luck that will be no problem. ;-) Steve