Still emailing patches?

Oh, pull requests are definitely the way to go for shipping code around. But sending patches is generally a better way of starting a conversation, because it puts what the reviews will want to respond to already in the message that they're replying to. You can certainly generate the message to reply to, and tweak the reply to go back to the author, and you could arrange to have the reply look like a reply to the pull request (so that threading works) and you could arrange to follow project policies on cc:ing other potential reviewers so they can skim your review and know what doesn't need to be said again, but it all just happens automatically if the patch is the original message.

Of course, this is only relevant if the project communication is mailing-list-based, and particularly if it's got policies which imply that participants must have heavy-duty email-handling techniques; that's not all (or even most) projects, but it is the kernel.