Well, most of the current developers read the forums anyway and can cross-post as needed. Conversely, the mailinglist archives are public (and typically don't lag much behind the delivery anyway, if at all) so those who want to can follow what goes on there fine now too.

On a side note, I anticipate to post less on the forums now that I can follow discussions here (the dev forum) in my mailbox (because I don't need to open the forum page and be tempted to post in other threads than those I came to check out).

I have to agree with KC here...

Not only are they a pain to follow, they are A) Relatively crappily formatted. (Try reading it in thunderbird. Heh, that is a mess). B) Don't flow particularly well. C) Have some rather annoying character formatting problems (For instance, %20 poping up everywhere is a good example).

Perhaps if someone could design a less "crappy" looking, "crappy" formatted, and "crappy" lagtimed mailing list I would be more impressed. However, the way it works currently is rather flawed.

For example, why not send an easy to read digest that is in HTML format as well as Text Format? HTML is nice because you can separate the enteries better, provides better formatting opportunities, etc. Not to mention that if the email is RFC822 compliant, the text version would still have to exist.

If someone could write a custom mailing-list/forum combo, it would be rather nice as well. Basically, the mailing-list is nothing more than a notification system for the forum, but also provides a method to mail the mailing list to add additional "posts" to the forum counterpart as well. (So you could use basically either medium seemlessly). Plus, if the forum adopted some sort of common formatting routine (similar to Allegro.cc), the HTML version could include images, functioning links, etc. (Not really important for the most part, but kinda nice sometimes).

Too bad I don't know more PHP

As I said, it doesn't lag too much behind
I think it should be at most a day behind.

I never really used it much, but doesn't changing some of the view settings
help?

No. The mailinglist should not be reduced to a forum notification
system.

Anyway, it seems that Matthew's mail interface to the forum is working, so
that's something at least.

EDIT: will, mostly anyway. Looks like the mailer inserts linebreaks where I don't want them, so I'll need to work aroud that somehow.

I guess it's a bit hard to say. I think we need to see the system in action
before deciding wether or not it will be useful.
What would be great anyway is if you could make a better browser/viewer for
the mailinglist archive. The ability to post responses would be a
relatively straightforward addition to that, I would imagine.

EDIT: discard; my mailclient screwed up and I had to retype the message, which was apparently send anyway.

on a different note, apart from the various bug fixes mentioned in the release note what is hugely different from 4.0.3 and 4.2?

Neil.

EDIT Silly me.

My favourite change has to be getting rid of the keyboard.dat dependency (well, for all ports except DOS). Someone else will have to give you the complete picture.

4.0 is not binary compatible with 4.2.