HI, Steve,
Hi ken
Doesn't the threaded view of emails in Thunderbird achieve the same as
subscribing to gmane. I have all incoming email related to LO filtered
into a folder and if it switches to threaded view it looks just the same
as the view in gmane, but without the need for another account.
steve
It does, but the devil is, IMO, in the details. 
Some of the details are in your personal preferences of how you want to access the mailing list and for doing email.
I like to do email as HTML, embedding images, using Comic Sans font, and the other bells and whistles available to you. But LO is text based only, meaning no formatting other than line length, no images, no proportional fonts, yada, yada, yada. LOL
If I used my email account to write a reply to an LO message, I need to manually make sure of the line length, correct formatting of the replies (the number of ">" characters at the beginning of the line, making sure the text quoted is assigned to the correct poster, etc.), a monospaced font, and who knows what else I'm not thinking of.
Perhaps LO takes care of this at their end, I don't actually know.
I've always had "irritations" with TB when replying to emails that have been forwarded numerous times. Editing was a real PITA. I've installed the latest version of TB just a couple hours ago, perhaps those "irritations" have gone away.
But if I use the Gmane newsgroup account, and subscribe to the LO users list, then reply to the message, all of that correct formatting is automatically taken care of for me. I don't have to worry about it, which is one of the good things about computers and good programming.
Using Gmane, when a message comes in that has quotes from numerous previous messages that are properly assigned to the writer, TB provides a different shade of grey background for the text, making it easier to see who posted what. If this isn't making any sense, send me an email and I'll return a screenshot that shows what I am trying to say.
I am not an expert at TB, still in the learning stage, so what I write from here on may be in error, as I've not experimented with some of this, it's just what I *think* happens based on the vocabulary used within TB and my experiences so far.
Scenario:
Let's say you are a new subscriber to this users list. And you do have some questions (that's why you came, right? ), and maybe some of your questions have already been asked and answered? How do you, using just the mailing list, get the previous X (let's say 500 for discussion purposes) messages, to scroll through and see if your question has been asked?
LO does have a mailing list archive, and you can set it to threaded view. But, those threads are not collapsible, so if there are 100 replies to the first post, you have to page through all those replies before seeing the next subject. As as I write this, there are 74 pages, @90 messages per page in my browser, to scroll through. With Gmane, the threads can be collapsed in TB, giving you only one subject line to deal with all 100 messages.
Those messages are in your browser, not on your hard drive for reference later. It is more time consuming to use that to simply scroll through the messages in TB, using either an email account or a newsgroup account.
This message of yours I'm replying to is already in the archive, I suspect the addition of new messages happens in real time.
Using email in TB, I don't see a way to automatically download the previous 500 messages automatically to your computer.
Using Gmane in TB, when you initially setup the account, you can can tell TB how many message headers you want to TB to download. Tell it 500, and you get the previous 500 message headers. If there is a way to ask for more old messages, I haven't found out how to do it, other than to unsubscribe and the subscribe again and ask for more, or for all.
With email, message bodies are automatically downloaded, unless you tell TB to *not* download messages over a selected size. Since you don't want you lose those photos of XXXXX being sent by someone, a small sized message from LO will always be downloaded.
With Gmane, and other newsgroups, you have to tell TB to download the message bodies at the outset. Otherwise, the message body is downloaded when you open the message. On my Mac, those message bodies are cached on the hard drive, so presumably the message body is only downloaded once, assuming the cached file is sound.
OTOH, with newsgroups and my understanding of the synchronization and storage settings is correct, you can tell TB to download all the message bodies to the computer.
For me, I see more advantages to having the mailing list displayed as if it was a newsgroup server, rather than email. Not to mention, I currently read 2 LO lists, and possibly may add another one or two in the future. With the Gmane account, I don't have to create any filters or deleted any filters as required.
At the moment, this is all I can think of. Hope I didn't bore you to death! 
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Unless it has changed (I haven't been back to the website in well over a year), you actually have to pay to ask for help on the website. Even if all I want is help from another user such as yourself. I have no objection to paying for help from the developer, but I'm *not* willing to pay the developer for help that comes from another user.