[[!tag wishlist]]

Maybe I'm not using ikiwiki right, and I'll appreciate any advice on this, but
it seems to me that using ikiwiki instead of a mailing lists has some major
weaknesses which I fail to overcome, but which may be possible to fix, maybe
using some client-side software.

The problem: Mailing lists give me things I need but can't find here, so I'm
failing to track the [[/forum]], [[/todo]] and so on:

- With MLs I can easily see what I read, to what I replied, mark things with
  colors and labels if my MUA supports it
- With MLs I can easily send a reply, without going through git. Reading and
  writing happen together in the same dedicated UI

I know I can subscribe to [[forum]] and to individual posts' comment feeds, but
it's not the same - I don't see the tree of comments like in e-mail. Either I
sort by creation time (not seeing evidence of more recent replies) or by
last-edited time, or perhaps by last comment (then busy pages cause less busy
ones quickly go deep into the list and are never seen by the user).

Is there an existing solution to this?

Random ideas, maybe direction for a solution:

- Make client software which takes a local git clone of a wiki and operates on
  it, while the user sees an MUA-like interface
- Add some plugin to ikiwiki that can cooperate with an MTA: listen to e-mail
  on a mailing list with specific formatting and put the content into a wiki.

What do you think? How do you keep track of the forum etc. in the same way it's
done with mailing lists?

(I don't mind a hacked solution that solves the problem for me, but if it's not just
me being crazy, I prefer a general-purpose solution that helps everyone)