Comments on: How do you consume mailing lists?

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 01:42:36 +0000

I 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.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:31:57 +0000

So Brad and Jonathan … what do you know setting up gnus on OS X with Fink and Carbon Emacs?

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:03:06 +0000

… for OS X. My bad.

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:47:58 +0000

They did. It’s called gnus.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:48:20 +0000

I 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.

By: Brad

Brad — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:42:01 +0000

If 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.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:31:56 +0000

Dangit. 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:

By: Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:29:52 +0000

For smaller mailing list, I let gmail handle everything for me.

For larger mailing lists, I use gnus.

By: Ron Davis

Ron Davis — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:38:17 +0000

I’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.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:32:40 +0000

Your description of GNUS reminds me of FortÃ© 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.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:07:10 +0000

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…