mailing list?

[Piter Smith]

I suppose mailing lists are dead, or dying, but, maybe JavaRanch could have one forum which also is a mailing list?

[Ulf Dittmer]

Would the point be that you can submit posts via mail? JForum had that capability originally, but we deliberately did not turn it on. (Not that it ever supported singling out forums to my knowledge.)

It's already possible to be notified whenever a new post is made in any particular forum.

[Piter Smith]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:Would the point be that you can submit posts via mail? JForum had that capability originally, but we deliberately did not turn it on. (Not that it ever supported singling out forums to my knowledge.)

It's already possible to be notified whenever a new post is made in any particular forum.

but not possible to reply....

[Campbell Ritchie]

Piter Smith wrote: . . .
but not possible to reply....

Please explain what you mean by that. You can follow a link in the notification back to the thread where you can post a reply.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Reply by email - sending the response post as part of the email body.

[fred rosenberger]

The problem I see with email is that by the time someone reads it and replies, hours could have gone by and the response won't make sense if 30 other people have replied. We have that problem now sometimes when someone takes 5 minutes to post a reply.

[Jaikiran Pai]

I think what Piter is proposing will make sense only when we send out a mail for each post in a thread (which the user is watching) and also include the post content in that mail.

We have reasons why we don't send the post content in a mail. Without the post content, you anyway will have to visit the thread to view the new post, so might as well reply directly on the site instead of from a mail.

[Paul Clapham]

I remember those forums from 10 or 15 years ago -- you could access them from your e-mail client, you could read the posts and responses which showed up in the natural tree structure in your mail reader, and you could respond to a post in your mail reader, which would result in an e-mail being sent to the forum and showing up in the tree structure for that thread. It had a four-letter acronym which I'm failing to remember right now, but the name "newsgroup" comes into my mind for some reason.

[Piter Smith]

Paul Clapham wrote:I remember those forums from 10 or 15 years ago -- you could access them from your e-mail client, you could read the posts and responses which showed up in the natural tree structure in your mail reader, and you could respond to a post in your mail reader, which would result in an e-mail being sent to the forum and showing up in the tree structure for that thread. It had a four-letter acronym which I'm failing to remember right now, but the name "newsgroup" comes into my mind for some reason.

Some of the Oracle mailing lists still work like that..anyhow.

[Henry Wong]

Piter Smith wrote:
Some of the Oracle mailing lists still work like that..anyhow.

Many support (issue tracking) systems still work this way too. The interested parties get an email of each update; the subject contains the information of the trouble ticket and the cc field contains an alias; responding to the alias (which is generally done via reply all), add a response to the trouble ticket.

Some people just prefer to read an email chain, than to log into a ticketing system (or forum) and reading a chain of discussion.

Henry