If I had the email address of every researcher in my field, I would never send a mass email to them describing my latest goofy idea. I would, however, send my latest goofy idea to a conference with those same reviewers (if I felt it was technically appropriate and correct.)

I mean we use to have newsgroups which basically implemented this.

Which of course is the point: it is in fact quite similar to a mailing list, just with some extra protocol surounding it to make it manageable.

So the attempted snark about it up thread is stupid.