Hi all,
As you are aware, we are conducting a test on Discourse to move on some mailing lists. It is not possible to bridge mailing lists and have a Nabble like gateway.
Here are the options:
- have a Discourse category only hosting a project (like Documentation, UX/Design). Contributors can post directly in the forum or follow the discussion and participate via notifications (received by mail). Subscribers to the mailing list can be mass subscribed to Discourse and the mailing list will be closed
- for Native Language Projects: we could have the same as above with sub categories per sub projects, see for example pt-BR who has Docs - Qualidade - Geral as sub categories
- have both mailing list and the corresponding Discourse category with no cross communication channel between the two.
- have Discourse read-only category mirroring a mailing list for example the Announce lists.
- have only a mailing list and nothing on Discourse.
- for users@mailing lists, we won't create a user category on Discourse Community because it will be redundant with the Discourse Ask instance. So either you keep the mailing lists or if your language is not yet there, we create a corresponding category on Ask.
This decision shall be taken by project and by each native language community. For example the Brazilian and the Spanish communities have already decided to go to the first option (Discourse only). It seems that Documentation will have both for the moment.
Discourse Community test instance is here:
https://communitytest.documentfoundation.org/
Please have a look at the archives we imported and let us know if you see issues or if you want to see how it works for your project.
Redmine ticket with all the details:
https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3567
(and a *big thanks* to Guilhem for all his great work on this)
Please read https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3567#note-15
and further on archives migration.
How to proceed next?
Discuss with your project or your native language community and let us know what you decided among the above options. I've set the reply to this mail to go on the website list.
When you let us know your decision, I'll send you another mail containing several questions about the migration type we need to proceed (mass subscribing list subscribers to the forum, import archive or not, retain addresses, etc.)
We would like to launch the instance at the beginning of June (as some communities are really impatient after the test 
but of course if you are not decided at that moment, it's still possible to create new categories once the instance is in production.
Don't hesitate to come back to me if you have questions.
Cheers
Sophie