Mailing lists were many times archived to a usenet newsgroup. The user experience was like a big, threaded email box. You would download headers and a few KB of

Mailing lists were many times archived to a usenet newsgroup. The user experience was like a big, threaded email box. You would download headers and a few KB of the text part of the message, and then select the binaries you wanted and your client would download the full message and decode them. Really not too different than a pop or imap email client. If your ISP didn't have the newsgroups you wanted, there were many open usenet servers and paid services as well. Groups were not really a hierarchy. You could only subscribe to groups that had messages. Dot paths were used to make them make sense to humans.