I'm only subscribed to lists which do not carry more than 10 mails/week.
This way my mailbox keeps mostly interesting stuff which I can oversee.
It is a _must_ to convert high-traffic lists into newsgroups because:
- one gets overwhelmed by the number of e-mails per day,
- the disk gets clobbered by the size of the whole bunch (argh, I
had 5 people sumitted to "debian-users" on my system),
- newbies are not capable of (or have other problems than) setting
up e-mail filters to sort the whole junk (hint: gnus is really
cool),
- high-traffic often means "general interest" (so why not make it
more public?),
- one actually pays for the whole junk to download it via modem,
- one has to unsubscribe when going on holidays,
On the other hand I see that
+ developers need to communicate more quickly than via news (takes
up to 4 days)
+ it is much easier to create a mailing-list than a newsgroup
So my suggestions are:
o Tell the people about the newsgroup "linux.debian.users" as an
alternative to the mailinglist when confirming their
subscription.
Ignoring the technical stuff is a special case of ignoring
subjects of no personally interest and can be done with most
news-readers.
(Yes, you can do this "easily" with mailinglist by using gnus,
too but thats the exception.)
o make at least "debian-users-digest" for those people who want to
keep on with the most interesting things
o split the mailing-list to keep developers off from
newbie-questions (they are likely to "waste" their time!) into
debian-installation
for questions "not" covered by the installation-manual :-)
debian-newbies
for those who have at least reached the login-prompt
but aren't familiar with the system yet [no technical
discussion allowed here; even such evil words as "emacs",
"kernel" and such are strictly forbidden] :-)
debian-users
the good old list; for "long-time" debian-users
debian-towers
high-level technical discussions
o make a "debian-all-digest" from all that lists above
-Winfried
