MyBB Community Forums

I've been running a Majordomo based mailing list (currently around 200 members) for several years but have started looking at MyBB as a logical "upgrade" with its advantages over my current setup.

However, some members of my mailing list are reluctant to leave the mailing list for various reasons. I want to put emphasis on user-friendliness, both visually (user interface, do away with any unnecessary options, buttons, text etc. which might just confuse) and hopefully make the experience as comfortable as with the list.

One advantage to a mailing list is that you can just sit back and the discussions will just pop into your mailbox along with any other mail. For a low-volume mailing list like mine that would mean you can easily follow every single message. With a web-forum you'd have to log on, then browse through the various threads just in case something new has popped up since last visit, which will take more time/effort.
The "alert me by email whenever someone replies to this thread" feature is great for messages you've started or have chosen to follow, but is there a similar user-configurable option for getting an alert whenever ANYTHING new is posted in the forum?
And to make it as similar to a mailing list as possible: is it possible to (also, as a user-configurable option) along with the email notification to read the text contents of that posting so you don't have to log into the web-forum (unless you want to reply, in case there's a "click here to reply" link in the email)?

I've also been asked if I could continue running the mailing list like before, but just add the web-forum and link them together so that a user could choose which way to perform discussions? I suppose if that's possible it would complicate setting it all up and administrating it all.

If you have any other suggestions as how to make my web-forum more user-friendly and similar to mailing lists (for those who prefer the latter), please post about it here! Thanks

I remember Ralgith said he might work on something similiar to what you are asking. He said it'd have to wait till the new year if i remember correctly.

The latter idea would only be possible with a bridge, i don't think many people would use it, so you'd likely either have to find a developer in the same boat, or pay for a bridge.

I would like to hear more about that, but couldn't find that username with the forum's search function.

Would a "bridge" for joining my mailing list together with MyBB be a huge and expensive task or something trivial? The second best thing would perhaps be RSS: does it work in the way that whenever someone posts something in the forum, if the user clicks on the RSS link the most recent posts will be shown? Not quite as effortless as getting it directly into your mailbox, but at least the user doesn't have to spend lots of time browsing around.