Malcolm Wallace wrote:
Yes, the sheer volume of posts is definitely becoming a problem (for me, at least). All your suggestions for keeping the community polite and helpful are good. But I wonder if there are also any useful technical tips for users like myself, who would like to be able to keep up, but feel they are gradually drowning?
Non-specific, I'm afraid, but technical advice: Get a decent mailreader, and learn how to use it well. Spending two hours or so learning the keybindings/advanced features of your mail reader will pay itself back 100 times over. Some people find that news readers are better than mail readers (really this is a feature of the programs, not the protocols; but they the programs tend to have different emphases). I believe the folks at gmane have setup a working two-way mail to news gateways for the haskell lists. Most people find it good to have a threading feature. (A few people have broken email clients which break threads when they reply, fortunately not too many on this list. If you're one of them, please fix it!). Couple this with the ability to either 'really delete', or just 'hide' a thread from view if it's not interesting to you and you start to work through the volume. It's stupid, but the the single feature that helps mail reading for me most of all is simply the fact that SPACE doubles up as 'page down in this email' and 'advance to next email in thread'. You can get through messages very fast this way. I use thunderbird, FWIW. And I don't think it's a panacea, but it works for me. In the past I've used mutt with some success. The emacs-based mailreaders are very powerful, but you will need to spend some time learning the keys. There are plenty of other mail readers out there. (Mind you, some of them are truly dire). Jules