Imagine you are a teacher with an XO, or some owner of an XO interesting in educational uses for it. He goes to the Teachers and education sub-forum.
There, he sees threads about pootle and translations, about etoys bugs, and other progress reports and assorted things. Only a small minority of posts have to do with others who are involved with learning and the XO _and_ posting about that (the sub-forums name should really mention learning). instead he sees posts from some far away land, and from people who seemingly are ignorant of the rest of the forum and its users.
So I ask, what has been the good that integrating mailing lists into the forum has brought to both the forum and mailing lists?