My 2 cents,
While I think linking W3T to an email system that would allow users to post to forums via email would be a nice addition, I don't think it is a priority. I agree that making it easier for users to participate in discussion forums is very important. I think that a good step forward with regards to email intergration that would make forum use easier for the user and also encourage users to return could focus on the email subscriptions tool. I think this is a great tool, as it really incourages users to come back and visit the forum and participate. I would like to see this polished up a bit, making it a bit more fool proof. Some suggestions:
-the option to subscribe to a forum could be listed as a button on each individual forum for registered users. As it stnds now, I find the subscriptions option hidden, not as accessible as I think it should be.
-The generated emails for each forum could list emails in a more readable sequence. As opposed to posts to the forum by date, have them displayed in accordance to threads on the forum. As it stands now, I find it a bit confusing when I get the daily posts for a forum, not 100% sure how the conversation threads come together. Perhaps forum posts could be organized under seperate headers of the thread title.
-Each individual forum post pulled together in an email daily posts could include a reference to what post it is in reply to. Also a link to that specific post could be included on top of the general link to to forum that is included at the top of the email. eg:
Subject: Re: Make it easier to build community, please

In Reply to: Subject by Poster

Poster: patagon

Posted on: 03/15/01 11:44 AM

Link: http://www.whatever.org/wwwthreads.php?to=specificpost....
Perhaps the daily emails should also include a line mentioning that in order to reply to a particular post, s/he has to click on the link that corresponds to the post.
One other thing that I think could use some polishing with the email subscriptions is tags. One can turn tags (markup or HTML) on and off in generated emails. This is great. I personlly think that the emails are much more legible with the tags turned off, but some important information gets lost. Links to other documents are junked when the tags are removed. Ideally I would like to see links remain intact, but the surrounding tags nuked.
1 up from this would translate the daily emails into HTML legible emails (my email reader reads them as plain text), that also includes a plain text version that defaults to this for plain text email clients (pine).
I am confident that a more polished email subscription system will lend greatly to the building of online community
-e