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).

I think it entirely depends on what the purpose of communication channel is serving.

Mailing lists are transient passive participation. I can sign up to a list and never have to do another thing because I use email all the time. Occasionally a back and forth discussion might pop up, but I can easily choose to ignore it by simply glancing at the subject line.

Forums are persistent active participation. I have to specifically access the forum, possibly logging in in the process, to see what activity has happened. Many do enable some kind of email notification with a set frequency. Digest emails lose the benefit of the quick glance decision to attend or not, while all activity would be similar to the mailing list model. As forums can encourage more silo-ed conversations or short disposable responses, getting all activity is generally not ideal, however.

Mailing lists only really work for corporations imo

Discussions on mailing lists are typically in depth and not just one line responses to one line questions, so top-posting would make it much more difficult to engage in those discussions.

Though, I've never really understood the use of a mailing list over a private moderated newsgroup that people could subscribe to.

Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?

An aside: I find it odd how HN users jump to agreement when a link to a single mailing-list message is posted, ignoring other discussion on the thread. I think it's because the UI makes it hard to see the rest of the conversation (unlike -say- the comments UI on HN itself)

IRC is still an underused tool in my opinion. The ability to just talk about one issue in a Mail List and keep track of the communication is great. I can't think of another tool that manages communication as well as a mail list (Forums are just not as good in communication notifications like a mail list.)

P.S. I still hate Mail List and don't use them anymore but nothing does it as well right now.

All of the mailing lists that I operate on my own mailing list server allow non-subscribers to post. Due to my anti-spam configuration, this isn't a problem.

Traditional mailing lists, before the rise of spam, were usually this way.

And anyway, this is a separate issue. A list which does not re-mail postings from non-subscribers can nevertheless not do Reply-to: munging. So once you are on the list and participate in discussions, you're still sending messages to the list, as well as directly to those in the discussion.

Earlier this year I was involved in a mailing list discussion in which one of the parties was actually (unbeknownst to me for a while) a "persona non grata": someone banned from posting to the mailing list. His postings were not being seen by the subscribers, but only those in the debate. This list does use Reply-to:; he just (trivially) circumvented it.

My original original point is that moderating mailing lists is not possible. I have not seen an effective counterargument. Reply-to munging and subscribe-to-post do not add up to effective moderation, and are easily circumvented.

I have seen it happen: someone banned from posting to a mailing list harassing discussion participants anyway. Perhaps he subscribed with a phony e-mail address to collect the list traffic, and then just composed replies as himself to everyone in the debate, but excluding the list robot (which would reject the copy).

"Modern" mailing lists still pass through the Cc: material which makes this possible, even though they set Reply-To, and disallow posts from non-members.

I don't care how you set up your mailing list; you're not going to easily be able to moderate out persistent trolls. You can't use IP block banning easily, because trolls don't contact your server directly; they can go through any number of e-mail service providers. If a troll keeps coming back over and over again, using different gmail addresses, are you going to ban everything from gmail?

This is pretty reasonable, if you think about it: it's worth making life nice for the people donating hundreds or thousands of hours of their time to answer questions, as well as for the people who only plan to interact with the system for a couple of questions.

To the OP: Try the http://gmane.org/ NNTP/web mirrors of mailing lists, if you don't want to sign up for them. In particular, reading lists via NNTP from gmane in Thunderbird is pretty nice, with real threaded discussions going back as far as you want, and no need to sign up, etc. (screenshot: http://hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/TextMate/gmane-thunderbird.png)

I really think the main problem is not the concept of mailing lists (and email/nntp) generally, but instead, as you suggest, the software that runs it. Google groups/mailman/etc. are all IMO pretty crappy from both maintainer and user perspectives, but they work well enough that no one's really putting effort into better mailing list software. Likewise, most mail clients are pretty crappy –either unconfigurable or with a difficult learning curve for configuration, with insufficiently easy-to-set-up and insufficiently flexible rule systems, etc. – when you get down to it. I should be able to absolutely instantly (<10 seconds) set up my email client to filter for only replies to my topics or mentions of my name in a particular mailing list (for example), but currently this is an involved process in every mail client I've ever used.

Of course, email is so so so much better for extended technical discussions than any web forum I've seen, that we all stick with it despite its flaws.

I’ll concede that at that point, a mailing list may be preferable to the RSS feed in the first place. Or Usenet.

Some lists try to fix this by abusing Reply-to: to try to steer discussion replies to the list address, but that is fundamentally broken.

About all you can do in a mailing list is to cull the junk from the permanent web archive.

[Edit: look, you can downvote all you like. I know how mailing lists work and stand by what I wrote. I have used mailing lists for almost a quarter century, and I run mailing lists of my own. I know the ins and outs, and ways they can be configured.]

It's just a fancy mailing list then? Minus the SMTP leg, plus privacy/consent issues and moving to a non-free storage format as well as concentrating the presence of the "thread" at one site.

The best email lore out there is saved to mailing list archives and can be linked to and shared just as easily. And mailing lists take "forwards" too.

But my favorite remains mailing lists with a web interface, like on sourcehut: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox. It's hard to beat it in terms of lightweightness