Should mailing lists integrate with the forum like before?

[HoboPrimate]

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?

[mburns]

http://www.mail2forum.com/forums/index.php

They have alpha release out, which we can try. I'd be happy to see it come back, but the software may just not be functional with phpBB3.

[HoboPrimate]

I changed the title of my original post to be clearer. My question was if the way that mailing lists were integrated with the old forum are a good idea. For example, the Teacher and education category had posts by the Localization, Library and Etoys list, which made it a mess (my opinion).
I think that if or when mailing lists are integrated, they should belong to their specific sub-category, so there would exist Mailing Lists/Etoys, Mailing Lists/Localization, and so on.

[ralphw]

I haven't seen the old mailing list behavior, but it would be nice to have a mail 'digest' format that is captures all the forum posts, perhaps with a [topic] prefix in front of the subject line.

Of course, I remember the old USENET behavior, where newsgroups were connected to mailing lists all the time.

[mburns]

To getting mailing list integration, we'll have to use mail2forum. They only have alpha software released for phpbb3, but Peter and I can try deploying it on the our test box, if there is sufficient demand to bring it back.

Personally, I really liked it.

[ralphw]

In the infrequently-connected environments around the world, e-mail is going to be preferable to a forum.

Visitng a forum or e-mail archives requires a constant connection. Not everyone will have broadband.

[HoboPrimate]

ralpw, I didn't think of that, good point.
But the way that the mailing lists were integrated before was not perfect. For example, the Teacher forum was getting messages from Library, Etoys and Localization. Why not then just re-use those names, and give a good description to the type of discussion that occurs in each.

[ffm]

One fix for this issue is to subscribe to a forum, then mark yourself to receive all replies to the forum via email.

Example: I'm subscribed to this thread, so I am emailed all replies to it.

'Couse then it's read-only...