I used email workflows before. And on a project I used to work on (Glasgow Haskell Compiler), people would originally just attach .patch files to issues in the

I used email workflows before. And on a project I used to work on (Glasgow Haskell Compiler), people would originally just attach .patch files to issues in the bug tracker we used, called Trac. This was how it worked for years, and while it did work, it had some similar outcomes: tons of patches that just silently were forgotten. The only saving grace is that I had a search macro setup that could just find "WITH attachment AND status = 'Ready for Review'" but of course that requires people knowing to fill out the forms properly to specify that this issue has a patch and that it fixes the problem and it's ready for review. Why would someone who spent 2 hours writing a bugfix know this? In contrast I have hundreds of hours in this realm so it's second nature. But it's a joke to think it's intimately or immediately familiar. Occasionally someone would email me and ask to look at a patch and ask if they did something wrong, which is why it got ignored. Ignoring any actual technical complaints, probably 80% of the time my answer was "Actually, I just missed this one" or "It didn't have the "patch" field set so my search didn't find it." I had to do this annoyingly often; it was annoying. I didn't blame anyone for it however. But pretending it's not annoying is also a lie. Honestly I don't think GitHub is the end-all of project contribution and it still has some really annoying flaws. I don't like the branch-merge workflow; I prefer non-branch-based merge workflows, which email does provide. But beyond that there are almost no advantages to it in my experience. I also suspect that there's a reinforcement mechanism going on these days. People who think email is good for this task already love email. They think it's amazing. In some sense I can agree, and in the past, it really was amazing. But less and less people even "bother" with email in my experience than ever before; to them, it's a necessary evil where they get shit shoveled at them 24/7/365, all so that they can pluck a single piece of information from the shitheap of trash; where they can go to reset their account passwords. It is not a bright shining feature of the internet to them.