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Comment by Popegaf | Hacker News Reader

Please not mailinglists. They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion?

What's more, not everybody follows etiquette:

- reply and just keep the original message at the bottom

- reply in between the original message

- reply at the bottom with the original message on top

- Some mix quotes and then reply to some parts in the original

And then how do you link to users or messages from your email client?

Plus who wants to have 5 different email accounts for 5 different mailing-lists? And why would I respond in a manner that allows the world to see my private email address?

I heavily disagree that emails are the way forward in this regard (maybe even in any regard).

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> Plus who wants to have 5 different email accounts for 5 different mailing-lists? And why would I respond in a manner that allows the world to see my private email address

You seem confused. Signing up to multiple mailing lists won’t require you to have multiple email addresses, and at the same time they don’t require you to subscribe using your main email address either. Many email hosts will give you as many mailboxes as you like, either using plus–addresses or just new mailbox names.

> And then how do you link to users or messages from your email client?

Every email has a unique message id. Simply include a message id in the body of the email, and your email client should turn it into a link (provided you happen to have that message available). If your email client doesn’t do that, perhaps you need a better email client.

> They are unbrowsable and who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion?

It really sounds like you need a better email client, or you just need to learn how to use the one you have better.

>It really sounds like you need a better email client, or you just need to learn how to use the one you have better.

I have heard this sentiment a lot and tried a lot of email clients and personally I still don't enjoy using any email client for this task. A properly designed forum software is always going to be easier to use for its express purpose than a mail client.

Could you make some recommendations then? You are kind of just grand standing, because it looks like you are absolutely right, but as some one who likes what you are talking about I don't know much more than I did before.

I can recommend Gnus.

Thunderbird, or Mutt if you like TUIs.

> If your email client doesn’t do that, perhaps you need a better email client.

Which email client does?

I use Gnus, which does this. It automatically turns message ids into links in both the headers and the body of the message.

It has some restrictions that I occasionally want to relax though. It doesn’t keep a complete database of all message ids it has seen in your inbox, just a list of the ones it most recently pulled into a summary. For example, if you pull up a summary that includes the latest 100 messages in your INBOX, then the links will take you to any message within those 100, but clicking on a link to a message older than that just tells you that it can’t find the message id in the summary.

Thunderbird works just fine.

> who likes getting their inbox spammed in order to follow a discussion?

I just put the emails into a folder, skipping my inbox, and browse them at my leisure.

What kind of mad person dumps listservs directly into their inbox.

I like managing this client side rather than trying to figure out how to fix this on the server for everyone.

> What kind of mad person dumps listservs directly into their inbox.

The kind of mad person who tries to use a Hey.com email account with a listserv...

Beside you cant edit a post after sending a mail, right?

Some call that a feature not a bug:

- incentivizes thoughtful consideration before sending

- increases reliability of the list as an archive

As a non english speaker, I love being able to edit a typo later on.

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