Not all of us have broadband to the brainstem, so the asynchronous nature of an email interface is useful.

Then use the onelist.com mailing list. I believe that very complaint is what got it formed in the first place.

the number of users who find the web interface intolerable will reach critical mass and the community will fracture.

If that's the case, then they should be turning to a REAL mailing list a la the onelist.com mailing list, instead of a broken implementation of a gateway like what Marc is operating. I'm not against a mailing list at all, what I'm against is the current implementation which is decidedly confusing.

what if Marc's service wasn't a screen scraper, but a digest burster? Would that be permissible?

To be fair, that's what Marc currently does, so the answer is still "no, that's not acceptable, because his implementation (one-way-only) is brain-dead and broken.

Marc also makes his list a broadcast service rather than an active list. Then, if one of us would like to reply, we can simply follow the link to the message on the board, without having to wade through the web interface to find the original message.

Actually, I'll be submitting a request to the author of the software to include a link to each message in the digests (That marc scrapes right now). This will make the digest more useful for lurkers.

My complaint, simply put, is that Marc's system adds unnecessary confusion where none is needed. There is an e-mail mailing list. If there was SUCH a demand for e-mail-based systems, it would be thriving. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Empeg folks are going to post wherever the users are. If there are enough users on the onelist.com mailing list, Empeg folks are going to subscribe and post. I think its important to note that, according to the archives, the Empeg folks ARE on the onelist.com mailing list, but simply that nobody uses it. I strongly object to trying to prop up a badly misconfigured mailing list with web-forum data simply because a minority want to use e-mail. I'll say "minority" with confidence, because if it was a majority, this forum would have died and the onelist.com list would have flourished easily.

D