[eschaton]

I think for internal corporate use, NNTP would work even better, if it were still supported in mail clients. I deployed it for exactly that purpose in the late 1990s and it was great.

Fortunately there are IMAP shared mailboxes, which we worked incredibly hard at CMU during the Cyrus project to ensure would work just as well as bboards did in CMU’s previous Andrew Mail System. (“Bulletin boards,” aka bboards, were basically CMU-local Usenet, with global Usenet under a netnews.* hierarchy via a gateway.)

Most IMAP clients worth their salt support shared mailbox hierarchies, even Apple Mail does, so it’s “just” a matter of setting up shared groups on a server.

[zzo38computer]

I agree that NNTP would be better. I do have a NNTP server because of this, although my intention is that it can be used for public discussions and not only for internal corporate use, although I did implement authentication in case some newsgroups are used for private discussions too.

(Note, the article in the IETF mailing list does mention Usenet too)