I spend much of my freetime to develop software diretcly targeting the maemo platform. I do not have much of this freetime, so it is essential for me to concentrate. For the communication to the community (and this included the community mailing list but is not restricted especially to this list), which includes:

• helping people
• participating in talks about my software
• getting to know what is really happening

It is essential for me to get information in the fastest way possible, not loosing development time. I also need a way to to clever batch mode communication, because I'm often away over the weekend, I'm in holidays or I'm simply to tired for a few days to check.

Talk simply fails for me doing this. It fails in tracking, it fails in batch working and other smaller ways (one of it beeing that I simply do not like forums I admit).

I simply do not have the time to regulary take a look at TMO. If you close this mailing lists (or all?) I will not move to TMO.

Closing down the community mailing list (and not forcing community related talks also into the list), I will loose another link to the rest of the community, further isolating me and people that act and think similar. I personally think of myself as beeing valuable to the comminity. I also think such people like me (prefering mailing lists) are valuable and while they are possibly now a (silent?) minority (proof?) they still exist, are important and can give valuable input.

I also understand that other people have other habbits, different timeslots or working behaviours and TMO ismore valuable for them. So I would not suggest to close down TMO :-)

This problem can IMHO only be solved technically, a technical solution was often requested and obviously never realized. I also see fragmentation of the community as a growing problem that will hurt and this suggested step is sadly in no way the solution to solve this. In opposite.

Please solve the problem and do not make the problem disappear by just making people disappear that could hint to the problem, even if that is easier than solving the real problem.

And it is funny that the request to close down the mailing list was first send to the forum. This sounds like not asking people which would be hit most by the decision :-/

The number of mailing lists is not a technical problem and there is also no technical reason to shutdown a low traffic mailing list.