Discourse Email Integrataion Short of Mailing List

Posted Apr 23, 2020 11:11 UTC (Thu) by hartmans (subscriber, #135969)
In reply to: Debian discusses Discourse by josh
Parent article: Debian discusses Discourse

I want to make it clear that I'm interested in trying out Discourse, and that there are discussions we had last year that I would rather have had on Discourse. But the idea that if you turned off Discourse's web interface, it would be a reasonably comperable mailing list is simply not up to snuff. Among other things, you cannot:

Reply off-list from the email interface; you don't get the sender's real email address.
Cross post to multiple mailing lists. If you do, you will get split threads on each list and future replies will not cross-post properly.
Use normal email quoting.

These are not criticisms of Discourse: there are good reasons it works that way. But Discourse would make a really crappy mailing list. Its email integration is adequate that a dedicated email user can participate in a forum offline.