David G. Miller wrote:
I have a number of old habits regarding how I use e-mail and getting the list in digest form fits better with these habits than your suggestions. I appreciate the suggestions but I'm really quite happy getting the list just once a day in digest form rather than have a steady stream of e-mails with intermittent flurries of activity that comes with getting the e-mails individually.
Most people just let their mail client filter lists to a folder that they visit at convenient times. Now that there are free mail account services like gmail and yahoo, you can use a slightly more drastic approach and send them to a different account that your mail client can handle separately - or you might like their web interfaces. With gmail you don't have to make a choice - you can set it up so your mailer grabs a copy with POP but it also archives a copy on the server. That way you can read-and-delete locally but can use the web interface to search or follow threads farther back than you saved if you decide some topic becomes interesting later.
There are also a number of benefits to letting some topics "settle out" before I get a chance to see them or respond that I won't go into at this point. One I will point out that you will still need to contend with is as follows. People (like me) who read the digest frequently are able to take a step back from some of the discussions and bring together multiple responses and several otherwise diverging threads. The threaded message view is based on the sometimes false assumption that once threads diverge they cannot later merge. Several times I have ended up consolidating replies to several divergent threads because that's where "the answer" was to be found. The threaded view of a discussion may be a nice way of organizing the elements of the discussion but it doesn't necessarily reflect the object of the discussion which is to find an answer.
I usually read new messages backwards (newest first) so as not to bother with already-solved problems, but I still want the mailer to be able to flip to a threaded view at the push of a button when the context doesn't make sense or I want to go back farther.
One of the other responders pointed me to Gmane as a way to reply to individual postings. I'm using Gmane to compose this and will attempt to continue using it in the future (I've been known to forget such things). Gmane appears to fit my criteria of not imposing any significant additional effort while letting me continue to enjoy the list in digest form.
I'd recommend giving gmail a try too, if you haven't used it already.