[jamiedolan]

Originally Posted by Videx

The biggest problem is that once people got used to this sort of thing they would never visit your site. You could be churning out tons of emails but your traffic would be down.

And lots of emails isn't a good thing these days. Even if you have a dedicated server there are fairly strict email limits to avoid spam. As soon as anyone marks an email "spam" then boom - all your emails to that domain go into spam filters.

Finally there's a new belief that younger users don't use email at all.

If your running the listsrv, you always have the potential to include ads in the footer of messages.

The feedback I've heard from people, including those that currently run lists is that they are not interested in forums. They like the simplicity of e-mail and don't care to deal with anything else. If you don't do the e-mail list service, I doubt many of these people would have been converted to forum users anyway. If you do maintain a mailing list and import it into your forum, then at least you have these people generating searchable content for your site.

I do get the distinct feeling that it is primarily an older generation that is using the mailing lists and younger users are much more inclined to make use of forums.