Maybe I'm not using ikiwiki right, and I'll appreciate any advice on this, but it seems to me that using ikiwiki instead of a mailing lists has some major weaknesses which I fail to overcome, but which may be possible to fix, maybe using some client-side software.

The problem: Mailing lists give me things I need but can't find here, so I'm failing to track the forum, todo and so on:

• With MLs I can easily see what I read, to what I replied, mark things with colors and labels if my MUA supports it
• With MLs I can easily send a reply, without going through git. Reading and writing happen together in the same dedicated UI

I know I can subscribe to forum and to individual posts' comment feeds, but it's not the same - I don't see the tree of comments like in e-mail. Either I sort by creation time (not seeing evidence of more recent replies) or by last-edited time, or perhaps by last comment (then busy pages cause less busy ones quickly go deep into the list and are never seen by the user).

Is there an existing solution to this?

Random ideas, maybe direction for a solution:

• Make client software which takes a local git clone of a wiki and operates on it, while the user sees an MUA-like interface
• Add some plugin to ikiwiki that can cooperate with an MTA: listen to e-mail on a mailing list with specific formatting and put the content into a wiki.

What do you think? How do you keep track of the forum etc. in the same way it's done with mailing lists?

(I don't mind a hacked solution that solves the problem for me, but if it's not just me being crazy, I prefer a general-purpose solution that helps everyone)

-- fr33domlover