Oh, yeah. It’s been a long time since I got a mailing list with more than a thousand people in it. The Cooker ml is a huge font of information (as misinformation sometimes), and some tiny little mesages can grow exponentially to very long discussions about anything (somethings even get lost among so many parallel topics).
I saw this happening to me this weekend. It was a local holiday thursday, and I didn’t need to work thursday and friday (can’t remember what was it about now), so I stop reading my e-mails wednesday evening. When I had enough courage to open my mailbox on monday (ugh) I was punched by 700+ messages awaiting for me. There were topics that extended about 100/150 messages long, one of them consisted 80% of a parallel topic that araised in the middle that has nothing to do with the original message. (!!) I had no choice than using my fast reading technics (if the first 3 lines aren’t interesting, delete) so I wiped out about 70% of them (I really think I’ve lost some interesting or either important discussions).
So, if you attend to a mailing list with this many people, or some that tend to create such long topics, read all your e-mails as soon as they get to your mail box, or suffer the consequences in the future.
Loading ...
1 comment so far ↓ | 215 views |
Just do like I do: don’t read most messages of the mailing lists you subscribe.
But you would need filtering rules you your mail setup, of course.
I look at the threads, and use some subjective rules to choose which ones I will read, and which ones I will not. Mostly based on the thread subject and who is participating on the discussion. There are some mailing lists with less traffic where I have the privilege of being able to read a few lines of each message before deciding to read it or deleting it, but that happens only on the less-traffic (and more specific to things to which I am interested) lists I am subscribed.
There is too much information everywhere. It really is a hard task choosing which information you want, and which information you don’t want.
Leave a Comment