DMs are syncronous. Its like slack or chatrooms. a giant scrollback buffer with stuff that is easily missed, especially in groupchats. DMs are a denial of service attack when it comes to productivity.

Mails are focused, threaded topics that can be resolved in logical units. They are way more useful to me than DMs.

I get lots of messages on here with people having issues, if I could pin them in my inbox so that I can update that person over time as I fix issues, that would be ideal. I could tag a public nostr thread with a nostr-git-issue, and automatically update them when the issue closes.

Public threads are the closest thing to mail threads, it just needs a bit of design for managing them, like archiving when you're done with them.