You can read and possibly even search mailing list archives OK, but if you want to ask a question or answer a question, you have to sign up for the list. Then you get all these emails from the list which are a pain. OK, you set up a filter and put them all in a nice little sub-folder, which you forget about until your mailbox is full. And it's a pain to search that sub-folder. And it's not easy to browse through the emails to find the ones you're interested in, like it's easy to browse around on a forum. And the data is organised chronologically rather than by topic (if you have a mail client that can sort by threads, it's a little better). ...

I use GMail, and it intelligently links related messages together, just like a forum post. So instead of hunting around for the replies to a message, they're all linked together.

All E-Mail programs should be like that -- E-Mail messages are related to each other, so why not link them visually? I see my wife's Inbox on Outlook with 500 messages and I'm not surprised it takes her an hour to go through all the messages.

I'm on the mod_perl and REST mailing lists -- haven't read a thing on either list in six months, but when I get back into those topics, I'll have months of reading to peruse, in my own mailbox (I'm still at 21% on GMail -- have been for about a year -- mail comes in, but they keep giving me more disk space), and not on some cranky mailing list server either.