Re: coping with a high-volume mailing list (like this one)?
"Lawrence H. Robins" <lrobins@his.com> wrote:
>I'm curious to know what strategies are used by regular subscribers
>to this list to deal with the high volume of messages (>250/day)?
I gateway all the debian-* mailing lists I read to local newsgroups,
using a mail-to-news gateway I wrote myself (at the time I found the one
in Debian, newsgate, inadequate; I don't know what pyg is like). At the
moment I think I'd count that gateway still a bit too unreliable for
public use, but technically it's freely available if anyone's
interested.
Once in a newsgroup, that means I get automatic expiry of old messages,
good threading in my newsreader (although I know mutt is good at dealing
with this), and can apply killfiles if it ever turns out I need them
(though I try not to do that for debian-*). Normally I simply read the
newest couple of pages of subject lines, and any articles whose subjects
grab my eye. If an article has an unhelpful subject line, I'm likely not
to get round to reading it - simple as that. If threads have been posted
to by a decent number of people, particularly interesting regulars, then
I'll probably notice them and read them. Anything that doesn't catch my
eye just goes by unread and eventually expires; I don't bother filtering
automatically.
>Also, is there any way to filter the messages **before** downloading
>them from your ISP to your local machine, which takes time in itself?
Personally, I don't bother, as I have a cable modem. :) If your ISP lets
you run things like procmail or exim filters on their mail server, then
you could do this; I'm not sure how you could do it otherwise.
>This message is being written from an e-mail client program (Eudora) in
>another OS. Eudora doesn't seem designed to handle huge mailing lists
>- I hope there is something better in Debian.)
Although personally I prefer newsreaders for mailing lists, that's a lot
of work to set up, and a certain amount of work to keep running
smoothly. My favourite mail client is mutt, and it handles mailing lists
very well.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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