How do you consume mailing lists?
Now that I’ve been nominated to be an AutoEditor at MusicBrainz, I’ve been thinking about dipping my toe into their mailing lists. [Okay, this is the straw that broke the camel's back; some of the discussions I had on edits last week with some of the other editors drove me there, and then getting nominated said to me, "Hey, maybe you should take this even more seriously.] But I deal with mailing lists only at my peril, because … well, because I know that they can consume my attention. I really only have time to deal with mailing lists during off-peak hours, so routing any mailing list through my main account seems to be a terrible, terrible idea.
What I’ve been thinking is setting up a second account for mailing lists, and I really don’t care where I do it—here on my box, at Fastmail, on GMail, or whatever. What I am looking for, however, are recommendations for toolsets to manage mailing lists. Do you have a special app that you like to use to help you handle threading, etc.? Do you use GMail and let its conversational tactics handle the overhead for you? I’m quite sure that a couple readers here are mailing list users, so I want to hear from you.
[This is where I take a short moment to sigh and remember that, for several years, I ran an announce-only mailing list for a sports ezine that I did. We were Deadspin but less funny and talented. I miss those days, but not the fruitlessness of devoting so much energy to something that ultimately meant little.]
I’m on Linux Kernel Mailing List right now. I’m only interested in a small sliver of the traffic there. I have gmail autoarchive, and move to a label all LKML traffic, and I scan subjects. Anything I’m interested in gets a star, and at the bottom of the page, I ’select all unstarred’, and delete.
This works well for LKML and me, since I’m just skimming. If I ever need to get back into LOTS of mail and mailing lists, I keep threatening to head back to GNUS.
GNUS is an addon to Emacs. It started life as a mail reader, but following the interesting tradition of ‘Emacs can do everything’, someone had the brain wave that mailing lists were just like news groups, so he made it so.
Treating large mailing lists like news groups is an idea with a lot of power. Killing threads, pretty fast browsing of threads and messages, the ability to *plonk* people (killfile them) without having to set up a rule (a single key stroke does it).
The downside is that GNUS is not trivial to set up (another interesting tradition inherited form emacs).
Heh… some quick reading seems to indicate that GNUS can now consume RSS if you wish…
June 27th, 2007 at 8:07 amYour description of GNUS reminds me of Forté Agent, which I used to use for this sort of things when I lived in the Windows world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Unison does email.
June 27th, 2007 at 9:32 amI’m on some mailing lists that get very little volume. I have a separate email alias for each of those lists (i.e. geofslist@domain.com, joeslist@domain.com, etc.) that deliver to my primary work address. Then I sort them into folders based on the “To” address.
I could use a better system, but - like I said - volume on mailing lists is low, so I don’t bother with it. I’ll be interested in hearing what you end up doing.
June 27th, 2007 at 9:38 amFor smaller mailing list, I let gmail handle everything for me.
For larger mailing lists, I use gnus.
June 27th, 2007 at 12:29 pmDangit. I want to complain about you two power *nix nerds skewing my results, but aren’t power *nix nerds the kind of folks who sub to high-vol mailing lists? :chuckle:
June 27th, 2007 at 12:31 pmIf you can stand to have another power *nix nerd skew your results, I too use gmail handle everything for me for mailing lists that aren’t work-related. For work-related mailing lists, I just use pine and manually move them into list-specific folders.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:42 pmI guess I could cheat and set Mail to route everything into a folder, which I’d then peruse at my leisure. I just fear going back to that route, because man … I’m very used to having an Archives folder and nothing else.
Thanks for the input, everyone. You’d think that someone would come up with a dedicated mailing list client.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:48 pmThey did. It’s called gnus.
June 30th, 2007 at 11:47 am… for OS X. My bad.
June 30th, 2007 at 1:03 pmSo Brad and Jonathan … what do you know setting up gnus on OS X with Fink and Carbon Emacs?
June 30th, 2007 at 7:31 pmI have not set it up on OS X, but it should not be difficult. The last time I set up gnus, I used a tutorial that I found on the web. Personally, I would not use Carbon Emacs, but would probably jump over to Aquamacs. I have been using Aquamacs on my MacBook and have been fairly happy with it. Let me know if you want any help setting it up.
June 30th, 2007 at 8:42 pm