&gt; IRC is still an underused tool in my opinion<p>IRC, like other chat and IM tools is synchronous. That is useful to get an issue solved quickly. But mailing list are asynchronous. People can think before answering and don&#x27;t have to be around at the same time. Also threaded nature of mail makes it better to archive discussions and referencing them later. An IRC log is full of other noise and little structure.