[CentOS] OT: help with email list reading programs w/ best features to read the centos and other lists that can filter people etc

Fri Sep 2 22:06:55 UTC 2011
Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com>

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> One typical scenario is when I am interested in following one branch
>> of a thread (i.e. a subthread), while I wish to ignore the rest. In
>> KMail's threaded view this is trivial --- subthreads are just various
>> branches in the thread tree, and I can always mark this branch as
>> interesting, that as uninteresting, etc., and keep following only the
>> interesting part of the thread.
>
> I guess I've never believed that there would be no interesting posts
> in a branch with an uninteresting parent or vice versa.  Is this a
> real statistical observation or just a guess?

Well, I don't know how do you define a real statistical observation,
but I described the above scenario from my experience from a couple of
mailing lists. What I can say is that it happens often enough to be
statistically significant (for me, at least). Otherwise I wouldn't
even notice gmail's lack of threading. :-)

>> I typically don't have time to read
>> through all messages in a well-sized thread. In gmail this is
>> literally impossible, and I need to go through *all* messages in the
>> conversation, since the interesting branches and unimportant branches
>> are mixed together.
>
> Can't say that I really read everything but unless you are way behind
> you mostly see the individual messages in the inbox anyway without
> much structure in the unread portion, so you you can decide about most
> of it based on subject/sender.

You probably check your e-mail much more often than I do. I do it
typically once per day, and in one day quite a big number of e-mails
gets accumulated on CentOS and Fedora lists (other lists I'm
subscribed to have nowhere near as much traffic). Estimating from
memory, in 24 hours I receive approximately 15-25 e-mails on CentOS
list, and around 40-50 on Fedora list (of course, these numbers may
vary widely). That gives me on average around 30ish new posts to look
at every day, while I may be interested in just 3-4 relevant ones. If
those posts were not sorted properly into threads and subthreads, I
would have to look at all of them, which is very time consuming and
mostly a waste of my time. When I'm not actively involved in a thread,
I make a rule never to spend more than 10 minutes per day for reading
e-mail. ;-)

So, no, I typically don't look at individual messages, and rarely ever
receive them one by one. What mostly happens is that every thread
accumulates 5-10 posts per day, and I want to read only those that I
know are interesting for me (those that continue the line of
conversation I was interested in yesterday, and new threads with an
interesting title). In gmail's interface I just cannot distinguish
those two types from the rest, within a single thread.

Also, on a side note, I filter each mailing list traffic to an
appropriate folder, so that posts from CentOS and Fedora lists never
actually reach my inbox, but rather get into their own folders. I like
to keep the inbox for personal communication, since that typically
deserves more of my attention. So when someone sends an e-mail to
*me*, it comes into inbox. When someone sends an e-mail to the CentOS
list, it comes to the CentOS folder, and is put in its proper place in
the branch of the thread. When I want to read CentOS mails, I just
switch to that folder, and see all the relevant and irrelevant threads
and branches at a glance, without even looking at the text of any
individual message. Then I read just the ones tagged as interesting,
and mark the others as irrelevant (if they are not marked already).

Back in the day I used to read everything, and it took me one hour
every day. After some time I learned to be more efficient in e-mail
reading. :-)

But I believe we are getting too tangential to what the OP wanted to know... ;-)

Best, :-)
Marko