"Lawrence H. Robins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 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)?
All my mail is handled by a server at my school. On this server, I run
procmail (via ~/.forward and ~/.procmailrc) to put debian-user mail in
a debian-user folder. I read this folder from home, with the Gnus
news-reader, via IMAP.
Gnus is occasionally hairy (way too many
features) but a great medium for reading news/mail. It runs within the
Emacs editor, so everything is a buffer. For example, you can
have the list of messages in one buffer, the contents of a message
in another buffer, your reply to a third message in yet another
buffer, etc. The contents of a buffer can be displayed with a
keystroke, or you can display several buffers at once.
Since Gnus treats everything like a newsgroup, all the messages are
organized according to subject ("threaded"). Finally, since Gnus runs
within Emacs, it means that I can edit my replies with the same
program that I use to read them (and not some half-baked appendage to
that program, either). So, less keystrokes to memorize, one familiar
interface, and so on.
I try to read debian-user a couple times a week (more if I have a
pressing question..). The messages really do pile up, and I'm still
looking for ways deal with this well. Gnus has an "expiry" feature
which will hopefully do what I want, failing that I'll try to write a
procmail recipe to "rotate" the debian-user folder, so that it never
contains more than, say, 500 messages.
Even when I don't have a question posted, I do scan through all the
subject lines. So, no filtering or scoring or whatever. (If I knew
exactly what I wanted to read, I wouldn't be subscribed in the first
place. See also next paragraph.)
If I want to search for a message on a given topic, I use the
www.debian.org search engine, which seems to more or less work these
days.
-chris
