Yes but people like me don't particularly like mailing lists for partly the reason Reggie says... you have to create filters every time someone discusses something you don't care about.

Subscribing to threads gives almost all the same benefits as a mailing list except the ability to respond via email. If there was a way to configure it to subscribe to an entire subforum (so all new topics created in community, for example) then it would also work very close to a mailing list but again without the reply capability.. but does *add* the capability of unsubscribing to stuff you don't care about.

My mailbox gets flooded and filled with crap from 4 different freelancer sites, a dozen linux security/bug/etc mailing lists that have actually gotten to the point that they just filter to their own folder and I find myself rarely ever reading them anymore.

Now.. I'll admit being able to respond through email would be tremendously easier on my phone on the go than loading the website and posting on a forum.. but it's not enough of a convenience for me personally to add even more junk to an already massive amount of junk I receive every day. Luckily, few of it is spam: but another reason I hate signing up with mailing lists is sometimes (especially if they get put on public websites) your email address can get picked up by spambots and then you get REAL junk. That's why I use a separate email address for every website or list I sign up with (whatever@mydomain.com) - so I can track exactly where my email is getting stolen/given/sold from.

Anyway... my contributions have been significantly less than almost everyone involved in this thread.. so I know I'm on the bottom of the totem pole.. I'm just offering some examples of why maybe someone may not like to use mailing lists.