# Mailing list features **URL:** \ **Category:** Support\ **Created:** [March 22, 2017, 9:31pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-features/59717 "2017-03-22T21:31:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 3
**Author:** ![wakama](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/wakama/32/69868_2.png) [@wakama](https://meta.discourse.org/u/wakama)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2017, 2:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-features/59717/3 "2017-03-27T14:34:48Z")
Thank you for your answer @awlogan 🙂 > [@awlogan](#): > > I was originally confused about how mailing list mode worked as well, hence my feature request which turned out to be a misunderstanding. It is really hard to understand what are the actual features and how they work. The lack of documentation doesn’t help with this regard (I’ve stumbled upon “[learn Discourse](http://learndiscourse.org/)” and searched - via Google and the built-in search engine - and still can’t figure out most of the mailing-list functionalities). @codinghorror: correct me if I’m wrong but I’ve got the feeling that discourse wasn’t thought of as a mailing list replacement from the beginning, then the mailing-list features arrived and there has been no effort so far to gather documentation about it. I can’t find the quotes back but there are a series of them in the line of “Discourse is a web-based discussion platform”. Despite my searches, I’m still unable to assess whether Discourse is a viable mailing list replacement. What we want to achieve is offer non tech-savvy people a way to take part to the discussions that have been taking place in our mailing lists (mailman powered) so far. Discourse seemed to be a good pick because of the great web interface, functionalities and the mobile support but these were my main questions when I started looking into Discourse, I still can’t figure out the answer : - could Discourse work as a mailing list with a forum-like web interface ? - or, alternatively, could Discourse work as a forum with complete mailing-list functionalities ? --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mailing-list-features/59717)._