If I can expand a little on Rob’s reply about using email for posting… (and hopefully not make things more confusing)
It would be most sane if postings fell into one of a set of well defined topics or group of topics right from the beginning. In an application that we are looking at - Discourse - you can either post directly on the website or via email. When posting onsite, you pick where the posting and all of the replies will go (including email replies). However, the best that can happen when the original post comes in via email is to have it addressed to a general category or subcategory (by using different email addresses). The email would start a new thread in that category. That posting, and the replies, will be in the original general category - same as now in Google Groups (actually GG doesn’t even have separate categories).
[Shameless Advertisement] A big improvement over Google Groups in a more capable application like Discourse, is that even with original email postings threads can be rearranged into different topics, and the postings can also be tagged with keywords to make searching easier. If someone is willing to do some rewriting, they can combine the posting and replies into a summary and put that into a searchable knowledge base of features, advice, and how-tos. Of course, if you only use email, things will look and work much the same as now in Google Groups. (hint - if things do go in this direction, even if you only use email, it may be worth occasionally looking at the website).
Happy and Healthy New Year
Jon Lewit
N26C - #115 - Inua
Kingston, NY – where it hit 50 degrees today!