The fact is, some people are going to prefer to use e-mail for discussions and some people are going to prefer the web-based forums. And not everyone in the same project is going to agree on which one to use. It's imperative that we have a two-way e-mail to forum gateway so that it's possible for people to participate in a forum entirely from their e-mail client. To that person, the forum would be behave exactly the same way as a mailinglist.

Convenience is important because it removes barriers to growing the community. But aside from convenience, the biggest benefit is that all discussions in jboss.org projects can be archived in Clearspace. We form a sort of "intersect" of knowledge. A user might search for a problem with RichFaces and realize that the same problem is being discussed in the AS forum.

To cite a real world example, it would be similar to nabble: http://nabble.com