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With the right email client, the efficiency of mailing lists for asynchronous longer-form discussions is unmatched (except possibly for Usenet – they are very similar). The crucial parts are auto-sorting into mailing list-specific folders, threaded display, newest-on-bottom, and keyboard navigation.

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The only think that email lacks that nntp has is the ability to easily find messages from before you subscribed to the list (or were CC'd). With email, you could download a list archive and import it in your MUA, but with NNTP, you can just subscribe to a group and pull up messages as far back as you want (up till the oldest message on the server).

Right, for mailing lists I used to ask some old-timer to send me their mbox archive of the list.

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