Yeah the information might be public but they also get to know (and control) who is accessing it and when, they can apply censorship (disguised as spam prevention) and prevent anonymous participation. 
And this further strengthens the power of the emailing cartel that plays unfairly with the small email servers.

hueso

bitcoin

Direct Link to new bitcoin-dev Mailing List using Google Groups.

Kathleen_Croteau

> The new mailing list archive can be viewed in the online interface (no Google account required) and is also backed up externally at https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev. The old mailing list contents can also be viewed there. Note we aren't relying on Google for anything critical here and are merely using them as a conduit for information that is already meant to be public.