Unfortunately for me, my experience using Discourse on Thunderbird is not as good as yours.
I trust that filtering works well, they’re just emails after all…
You say “decent threading” but I get none of that: each individual post in any (Discourse) thread whatsoever always arrives as its own email, not as part of any (email) thread.
Replying to other peoples’ posts from email is also unreliable because people may have edited their posts in the meantime, possibly making your own reply invalid/obsolete/nonsense. To me, this is a big problem: I put effort into writing to others. If what I’m replying to changes and invalidates my reply, it’s wasted effort.
The quoting problem you mention is not a small one either: no email client understands this:
[quote="SomeoneElse", post:NN, topic:NNNN"]
the quoted text
[/quote]
Because that’s not how text is quoted in email.
Granted, this may be only applicable to text email; maybe HTML email works well enough, visually. But if I’m going to read my email in HTML, might as well use the web interface and get the full bloated experience, as the devs have intended…
Someone could also argue that this is not Discourse’s problem – “if email clients don’t understand Discourse quote syntax, sucks to be you… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. My reply to that would be that Discourse is the platform advertising ML mode, not the other way around. As I said on the discussion of this proposal’s predecessor, feels like “ML mode” is only pro forma, “to stop old dogs from barking too loud”.
Oh and I can’t seem to find how to properly subscribe/unsubscribe to tags/categories. I’ve never been so bombarded with spam since I joined this Discourse and enabled ML mode… There’s very likely a setting for this but I haven’t found it yet.
