I wouldn’t do a mailing list these days, but as someone who spent the early part of my career interacting with devs that preferred this method, it’s actually pretty ergonomic by a 2005 standard. A message thread aware, text based email client that can turn messages into patches in a keystroke makes it actually pretty comparable to modern code review…
I think it’s hard for younger devs to get this because they’re used to email being stuck in a crappy, unthreaded browser interface or Outlook etc. (which are terrible for mailing lists) and most collaboration taking place in code review and chat platforms like Teams/Slack but for decades before these were feasible, email was the way…
I’ll note that a number of groups and forums send mailing list like emails (google groups, django dev being a big one) and that notifications can be threaded from places like Github with the right client.
Thunderbird has good threading. Roundcube webmail is also capable here.
I wouldn’t do a mailing list these days, but as someone who spent the early part of my career interacting with devs that preferred this method, it’s actually pretty ergonomic by a 2005 standard. A message thread aware, text based email client that can turn messages into patches in a keystroke makes it actually pretty comparable to modern code review…
I think it’s hard for younger devs to get this because they’re used to email being stuck in a crappy, unthreaded browser interface or Outlook etc. (which are terrible for mailing lists) and most collaboration taking place in code review and chat platforms like Teams/Slack but for decades before these were feasible, email was the way…
It certainly beats Teams, Slack, or Discord. For a start, you have control over the messages and can actually search on them.
Matrix?
I’ll note that a number of groups and forums send mailing list like emails (google groups, django dev being a big one) and that notifications can be threaded from places like Github with the right client.
Thunderbird has good threading. Roundcube webmail is also capable here.
What clients are good for mailing lists?
Thunderbird has good features for mailing lists and threads.
I used mutt back in the day, opening vim for message editing.