One concern I'd have is the degree to which we can capture bboard web input from an incoming email. For example, suppose you make use of the "topics" feature in bboard. Is it possible to create some intuitive way for users to indicate topics in their emails and have the bboard recognize it?
And what about threading? I'm not a big fan of threads (or trees, to be more accurate) in bboards, but I'm guessing that at least some folks are going to want to implement them in 4.x. Can an email provide an adequate interface to let users indicate whether they are replying to a post or its parent?
And what about identifying posters? One of the great things about bboard is that it links all your posts to your profile. We'd want incoming emails to be reliably recognized by bboard as coming from a specific registered user. In ACES, at least, making this work required some thought. Basically, (as I understand it), the ACS generated a unique "reply-to" email address for each user receiving an email alert for each post. The system could reliably identify the users because only one user could possibly be replying to a given email address. Will it be possible to make something like this work with a third-party listserver?
