According to its docu and forums, discourse can behave as a mailing list. It can be setup to:
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Enable starting new topics in a category by mailing a category specific email address
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Over at OK Brasil we are reformulating our communications. We’re considering Discourse, but have agreed that without all these features enabled Discourse is mostly useless.
I really worry that discussion will happen here and people who thought they would be included via the mailing lists will be left out.
I urge us to take the plan where we use email with this forum and deprecate the email lists by mailing sending out notices that everyone should join the forum instead. One discussion place is better than fragemented, and the forum is the best tool.
I agree, it would be great if discussions on discourse and on mailing lists are duplicated. Discourse is much better to follow but many people are only used to mailing lists.
This can be a way to combine both tools.
In France we are also considering switching our communication to Discourse, hesitating on using our own forum or this one.
Last I heard was they’d only do it after the migration to OKI servers. It seems that migration should have taken place today, so hopefully this will come soon…
This is something we can take a look now that the migration is complete and things are fine. I’m going through the documentation linked from here to see what we can do.