On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Craig Forbes
<cpforbes@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I use Simple Machine Forum on http://glasscutter.org/forums and it allows
> for notification of new topics and of replies to topics in which you reply.
> So you can:
> * get a notification for each new topic, on any and all board(s) (i.e.
> sub-forums) you choose, and
> * automatically or electively be notified of replies to topics in which you
> post.
So after I get a message about a new topic I have to reply to it (or
presumably opt in without replying) to get further notifications?
If I understand you: Yes, you can click Notify on any message. Or you can set preferences in your profile to automatically notify you of replies to any topic in which you post. To actually reply, you'd have to click the link in the mail to go to the forum itself.
Can you request to be emailed every message in certain board (to be
more mailing list like)?
Yep. There's a Notify button for every board. (It doesn't notify you when you post, as you might expect.)
Do the email notifications do the right thing with the In-Reply-To
header so threading mail readers can do the right thing?
Um. Dunno. Haven't used it THAT much. I suppose it would, if only via the Subject field...?
It seems mostly for keeping you in the loop when things are added without actually having to check the forum site daily.
I think good 2-way email integration is a requirement for replacing a
mailing list with a forum.
OK, that could be pretty rare. Creating a new topic with an email would be... tough to manage, I think--for instance, most email clients don't have a field to indicate what board a message should be posted to; so I reckon each board would have to have its own "email address." An emailed reply going into the right topic *should* be programmable, so long as the sender doesn't change the subject line. And note that many forum tools allow a different subject line for a post within a topic, so post-via-email would actually have to be supported by the email client (with a "Topic" field or some-such, independent of the Subject field).
I reckon I haven't seen an actual two-way-email-capable forum, yet.
Have you (or anyone) used Nabble much? I personally prefer mailing
lists so I haven't attempted to use Nabble as the primary interface to
any mailing lists.
There's an Icehouse List Nabble. Google Groups also allows "listserv echoing," and one could reply back at the Group so long as the group email is on the listserv member list.
In the end, forums and listservs are two different beast, with pros and cons to each of them. I'm not really all het-up about forums anymore: I used to want to do as much with forums as possible, to be machine-independent (i.e. access everything I do online from any computer or browser); but now I mostly use web mail, too, so it's a push either way on that front. Again, if Mailman could cull HUGE auto-replies (top-posting) or allowed HTML/RTF mail, I'd see no meaningful difference beyond a few minor convenience features (and stuff like Karma or Rankings, which we've little need for in our small-ish community).