From: Julian Fitzell <julian@...4.com>
Date: 2002-10-01T10:04:31+09:00
Subject: Re: announce@ == less email (FAQ item?)

Sean Chittenden wrote:
[...]
> With my developer hat on, I only use Ruby and C/Ruby.  With my DBA hat
> on, I only use PostgreSQL and BDB.  As a sysadmin, it's FreeBSD.  I
> work hard to be good at what I do and enjoy staying informed of what's
> going on in each of those communities.  When I read my email, I read
> it in the order of 'inbox', 'cvs commit lists for projects I
> maintain', 'cvs commit lists for the products I use', '-announce
> lists', '-bug lists', '-security lists', '-bug lists', '-hacker
> lists', '-admin lists', '-audit', '-arch', and generic user lists some
> where down at the bottom of the pile.  -talk, however, doesn't fit
> nicely into that stratification.  -talk is the bug list, is the
> security list, is the -hacker list, is the -admin list, is -arch list,
> and up until recently, used to be the -core list.
[...]

I have to totally agree.  When I first started using ruby I subscribed 
to -talk and was blown away by the volume of mail.  I even use different 
email addresses to subscribe to most lists so it's all broken up into 
folders for me already, but even then there's too much information for 
me to parse.  I just can't make myself even skim all the subjects - I 
get too bored about half way through and just mark all as read.  My 
solution at the moment is to filter this mailing list and only allow 
messages through with certain keywords like "web", "XML", etc.  But this 
sucks because sometimes partial threads come through, plus I get, for 
example, all of David's messages since he has "web" in his sig :D

It's very easy for someone who wants to read every single message about 
ruby to subscribe to multiple lists... it takes maybe a few minutes of 
their life, once.  For the 95% of people who have more limited 
interests, it is difficult or even impossible to select only messages 
that are related to certain topics unless the lists are split up.

Having one mailing list is like having lossy storage.  The user who 
sends the message knows what their email is about, but as soon as they 
send that to the One Big Mailing List, that information is lost in a 
form that computers can understand.  I can now no longer use a computer 
to categorize the mail for me.  If it's split into separate lists, I can 
merge all the lists into one folder and there is no difference, but I 
now have the option of using that meta-information (what list the mail 
was in) to make some decisions.  Always hold on to potentially-useful 
information until the last possible moment.

Julian


-- 
julian@beta4.com
Beta4 Productions (http://www.beta4.com)