Or maybe it is already and I'm just inept?

Interesting idea. We'll add it to the list of things we're looking into. It certainly might be a worthwhile option, given the increased email spam filtering nowadays.

In the meantime, we'll most likely revert back to posting an announcement every time we send a TalkMail newsletter with a link to the archived version. We had gotten away from this practice because for awhile there it seemed the email distribution was relatively stable, but we appear to be running into some problems again with various providers blocking our address.

Also, if you haven't already, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for The Gate blog. It's written by Canarsie and Kiwi Flyer and is very TalkMail-like in that they feature interesting/informative/entertaining/humorous FT threads ... and they post pretty nearly every day, so in that way it would make an even better RSS feed than TalkMail.

Thanks for the idea.