Re: coping with a high-volume mailing list (like this one)?
Frank Copeland <fjc@thingy.apana.org.au> writes:
FC> On 29 Nov 00 05:34:28 GMT, Lawrence H. Robins <lrobins@his.com> wrote:
LHR> I'm curious to know what strategies are used by regular
LHR> subscribers to this list to deal with the high volume of
LHR> messages (>250/day)?
FC>
FC> A mail2news gateway. A decent news client is always going to be a
FC> better bet for dealing with a high volume threaded discussion group.
(Not for newbies, but...) I read all of my mail in Gnus, the singing,
dancing mail- and newsreader for Emacs. Gnus' view of the world is
that everything (including mail groups, mbox files, IMAP folders, ...)
is a newsgroup, and reacts accordingly.
Gnus has a couple of nice features. One is automatic expiry: for
selected groups (including all of the high-traffic Debian lists I'm
on), mail sits around for about a week, then automatically gets
deleted. Another is adaptive scoring: each article gets a score based
on its author and subject line. If I read articles with certain words
in the subject or from a particular author, the score goes up; if I
kill articles off, the score goes down. This way, for the most part,
stuff I'm interested in filters to the top of the list.
The big downside of Gnus, of course, is that it's written entirely in
Emacs-Lisp, and you pretty much need to know elisp moderately well to
be able to effectively configure it. It is a very powerful program,
though; current versions support reading and sending MIME
out-of-the-box, and good support for encrypted messages is coming up
in the next version.
--
David Maze dmaze@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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