I never got many longer one-on-one conversations started when I was on mailing lists. Maybe because then it still took me much longer to write in English. I didn't have yet the years of internet and fandom practice. So every reply took much longer to write, and early on there weren't online dictionaries around then either, so I was sitting there with the paper one, and of course that regularly failed with slang or the worst really brand names and such.

That was probably part of why I didn't take to IRC either, because the conversation was just moving too fast to carefully reply.