[hga]

There are mailing list clients that will (try to) thread conversations for you. The Google Groups based ones display that way, you can (generally) read them without signing up. And doesn't Gmail attempt to thread conversations? Nothing says you have to use one mailbox for everything ... I use three, a main Fastmail one, a backup Hotmail one that gets one type of traffic that tended to not get through Fastmail or whatever vendor I used before them, and another Hotmail one for a thinly disguised nom de guerre.

Serious newsgroups of the sort you'd be interested in should be covered by http://gmane.org/ , and when I last subscribed to a professional newsgroup service, they and the general netnews community were good about blocking most spam. Look at this one I just picked mostly at random: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.prolog.swi

Don't know about forums, but presumably there might be some out there. Spend some quality time with gmane and you might find links to some.

Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities. And of course you'll be able to engage some of them in their comments sections.

Good luck!

[olliesaunders]

Thanks for the useful reply. I’m giving MailMate some serious consideration depending on whether the smart mailboxes feature can distinguish between threads I’m involved in and threads I am not.

> Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities

Yeah that’s quite a good point. Twitter too I guess. The trouble with blogs and twitter is that you can’t ask a question unless you have a blog or a twitter account that is popular.

[hga]

The latter for blogs would depend on patience, and effort and/or luck. I.e. find a relevant blog, and either the blogger brings up the subject you're interested in, so you can ask a question, or---and this is probably the most important thing you can do, whatever forum type you do it in---become part of that blog's community. After a certain point you'll be able to ask the author directly and perhaps have it become the basis of a blog positing.

If you can find a community you'll be a long ways towards being a position to get your needs satisfied.