wish: do not separate www-forums from maillists

Currently there are 3 public converstions mainstreams: WWW-Forums, e-mail lists, nntp-conferences.
( if to forget exotic, like p2p GNewsGroups)

It is sad that usually they are separated, since each of them has its drawbacks

:

WWW gives You a lot of ways to add extra features like Karma, user profile with his picture, etc - but it forces You too beonline, eats a lot of traffic and very fragile versus browser crashes (and gives You no way to compose some long message several days, heavy thinking over it)

maillist, though quite popular, insists that You receive all the messages, so it also generates big traffic and makes harder to filter out uninteresting topics. As well since it is serverless, it is not intuitive to make an URL to send to some mate to read - each mailisting has it's own www archive module (if any)

nntp to me seems like enhanced maillist, can be disibuted through anumber of servers, has standard URL's to the certain message as well as more-or-less standard way to route discussion from one forum to another (if it gone offtopic) - but is not too popular, alas.

While there are the services, merging them - so it is quite possible.
Examples: www.rsdn.ru has www-forum, written in MS.NET, with their proprietary SOAP interface and NNTP gateway based on it.
www.talk.ru - free www-forum hosting with nntp and e-mail access, alas it is not localised to English, hence of low interest abroad RuNet.
Google Groups 2 beta - as ar as i can tell, aimed to reimplement talk.ru but with international usability.
www.Gmane.org - gateway for maillists, giving them nntp and 2 www interfaces (forum-like and blog-like)

I wish that Drupal users were not forced to choose between maillist and www-forum, but instead use single forum set with www, nntp and e-mail methods to access it.