On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 06:24:55AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote: > I get more mail than that before breakfast. If you've got the > right tools, it's easy to deal with.
This is an excellent point. Many of the people who lodge complaints like the one that started this discussion thread have chosen very poor tools and thus have conflated the failings of those tools with some non-existent inherent problems with mailing lists. Serious email users should be using mutt, which is fast, compact, resistant to attack, and has an astonishing number of features. Those who receive large volumes of mail should be using procmail to pre-sort it, and they should be aware of RFC 2919 (and thus the existence of List-Id) as an excellent means for doing so. These two tools in combination make dealing with large amounts of traffic to large numbers of mailing lists quite easy. Furthermore, everyone using mailing lists should be maintaining their own archive, simply because there's no reason not to. The storage required is small by contemporary standards and doing so allows the use of local search tools (e.g., grepmail) which can invaluable in locating relevant messages. (Those who haven't been doing this can usually backfill by downloading the archives maintained by the site running the mailing list. in turn, everyone running a mailing list should take care to see that those archives are fully accessible, unredacted, and downloadable on demand.) ---rsk
