[kajaktum]

All this is true but mailing lists UI sucks. Please tell me how you navigate a tree of messages? It is not easy to tell who is this responding to and who responds to it. Yes, it can be figured out but why does the tree change as I navigate it? [0]

[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/7/103

[layer8]

This is all a matter of the email client. Useful email clients show email threads in trees like this (the red lines and arrows): https://vigasdeep.com/2012/06/07/mutt-the-ultimate-mailing-c...

[arp242]

What if you're not subscribed? I don't usually care about the day to day of Linux kernel dev, but that one thread might be of interest to me. Actually, I might have something to contribute, but since I'm not subscribed the UX on that sucks too.

"Just use mutt" as a reply to "I want to read this one email thread" is rather missing the point. Plus the reality is most people neither use nor want mutt. Many people think the UX on mutt is horrible. Nice if it works for you, but it doesn't for many. So there's that.

[pabs3]

There are tools to import mails into whichever email client you prefer, especially if the list is archived on a public-inbox instance, which is the best mailing list archiving system so far.

https://lwn.net/Articles/875239/ https://blog.gnoack.org/post/lei/ https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/lore-lei-part-1-getti... https://b4.docs.kernel.org/ https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl

[arp242]

You can't seriously claim that this is good UX. And that's what this is about: not that it's impossible but that the UX is not good, especially for the casual user only interested in the occasional thread.

[skydhash]

The web interface for the archive is for casual users and I believe most have clickable link for the subject that lists the email in a thread and a “previous/next in thread” button.

If you’re downloading mbox files, then you know how to handle them.

[pabs3]

It depends on your client, if you have one with bad UX, then get a better one.

[mcdow]

I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to build a nice UI over a mailing list. You could make it as nice as Slack. Has this been done?

[arp242]

Spent some time on this a few years back and have a half-finished project for it. The thing that proved to be a huge roadblock was importing existing archives since many don't provide a good interface to it.

The https://lore.kernel.org site is actually fairly decent, but limited to Linux kernel stuff and some adjacent projects. Gmane was quite nice too, but now defunct (the web UI anyway).

[lmm]

It hasn't been done, because it's impossible. You might get the first 80%, maybe even the first 90% if you had enough money to hire top designers for several years, but you'll never reach Slack level polish.

[perching_aix]

To be honest, I had a lot more trouble finding the tree there than understanding what it shows per se.