It's how mailing lists were supposed to work circa 1992. But web archives for mailing lists are more than 20 years old. [1] And honestly, I'm not sure "supposed to work" is correct. It's how they did work, sure, but thinking back to the mailing lists I set up pre-web, the goal was to create a forum many people could use. That a mailing list was used to do that was a function of the available tech and how people connected.
And I'll note that from what I can tell, forum software predates mailing list software. LISTSERV only goes back to 1986. [2] Forum software goes back to the mid-1970s [3], and the WELL was started in 1985 [4]. So I think it's reasonable to argue that online forums are the "real" experience, and mailing lists were more an implementation constraint for the decade or so that email popularity outstripped the richer interfaces of the terminal era and the web era.
The Well isn't a great example here. You can't read anything on the Well (other than a couple of public forums) without signing up for a paid account and disclosing your real name.
For early BBS's it was routine to create an account before doing much of anything, though they often didn't verify anything. I think some had a limited anonymous account you could use?
Was there anything before gopher that let you seamlessly jump from machine to machine?
And I'll note that from what I can tell, forum software predates mailing list software. LISTSERV only goes back to 1986. [2] Forum software goes back to the mid-1970s [3], and the WELL was started in 1985 [4]. So I think it's reasonable to argue that online forums are the "real" experience, and mailing lists were more an implementation constraint for the decade or so that email popularity outstripped the richer interfaces of the terminal era and the web era.
[1] http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/history-listserv.asp
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISTSERV
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONFER_(software)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL