If this wasn't so sad, it would be funny.
I think it was a year ago that there was a rather large flame way on
news.software.readers about the "unified message interface" that
Netscape presented.
If I recall correctly (and it was a while ago) there were a group of
people felt that the only difference between newsgroups and mailing
lists was the transport mechanism; they were both "groups of messages",
so why not give them the same interface? People pointed to GNUS as an
example of how this could be used successfully.
Here we see one obvious drawback; when using the "one unified
interface", less sophisticated users don't understand the different
conventions used in mail and news, which makes like difficult for FAQ
authors who have been posting their FAQs for years.
I remember from the flame war that the Netscape people were pretty
active in this discussion; why not post your theory to
news.software.readers and see what they say? They seemed like a
pretty reasonable bunch.
--Ken