Alternate way to view and respond to new posts

Call me old fashioned, but I like to use my email client to view and respond to online communication. I use Thunderbird which can aggregate my many email accounts as well as the RSS feeds I like to view.

It would be most convenient if I could receive new posts to the forum as an email. I am proposing that each post could be a separate email to the email account that used I registered for the forum. Perhaps if the forum was very active a digest which combined either a certain number of posts or all the posts within a certain period of time. Essentially I am proposing that the forum also be available as an opt-in mailing list. Additionally (but not as important) it would be convenient if I could then use my email account to send posts that would appear on the forum as if I had entered them on the forum.