Mailing lists are close to perfect; one missing feature from mailing list software is the ability to easily reach back in time to discover threads from before one joined a project.
For quick questions and discussions, irc is hard to beat.
For quick questions and discussions, irc is hard to beat.
And in practice, at large companies, forced expiration is used to control email storage space, in part because of the duplication.
So at very minimum, you want something threaded like email, but stored in a single location, so storage/duplication/deletion aren't problems, and indexed searching is available. This also allows things like tagging someone into a thread after it already started.
This doesn't make any sense. If you're subscribed to a mailing list, you will see everything sent to it.
This isn't a clear argument. What do you mean?
> So at very minimum, you want something threaded like email, but stored in a single location, so storage/duplication/deletion aren't problems
Certainly, the distributed nature of email may pose problems for an organisation which stores emails for a number of its employees. Storage is cheap and backup processes de-duplicate data so using mailing lists shouldn't pose too much difficulty.
The whole point of Doist is to get us away from the interrupt-driven behavior of constant notifications, and the instant gratification of response. Email lists do not solve this problem, unless you turn off your email client entirely.
I must be missing something, I've always found mailing list UIs frustrating to navigate and explore. Does anyone maybe have a primer on how to get the most out mailing lists for someone not already intricately familiar with them?