What is the essence of maillists and how do they work?

Question

Programming

Many open-source projects have maillist sites
. For example, here: https://lists.strongswan.org/pipermail/users/2016-...
What's the point? This is pretty unreadable. It would be more convenient to do it in the form of a forum or at least on one page in a tree format, otherwise it’s not very good to switch between each letter back and forth.
Where did it come from? How to subscribe/ask a question in a similar maillist?

Answer 1

What is the point?

The bottom line is that everyone receives the same messages in a standardized format, and then each subscriber processes them as it suits him.
The mailman web interface also has "messages sorted by...date/thread/subject/author" buttons.
And often several web archives archive the same newsletter, for example, for a message at your link:
marc.info/?l=strongswan-users&m=145439518814054&w=4
blog.gmane.org/gmane.network.vpn.strongswan.user/ d...
You can watch where it is more convenient.
Well, of course, your mail client can look like anything.
Below is a link to a page with instructions: https://lists.strongswan.org/mailman/listinfo/users