On Aug 11, 2011, at 6:58 PM, Martin Rex wrote: > Richard Kulawiec wrote: >> >> Let me start with a preamble: I think that those of us who choose >> to "drink from the firehose" by subscribing to many mailing lists > > List-Id: is only useful for folks who have either lots of time on > their hands, or want to use automatic archival and have no desire > to actually process the email they're receiving. Not sure why this is. I sort by the list address in the to: or cc: fields, but that's a limitation of my MTA. > >> >> Now, to the substance of what you've said: >> >> I'm not surprised this presents difficulties: funneling all incoming >> mail into one mailbox means that...all incoming mail is in one mailbox. > > Yes, and that is the most efficient way to perform full processing. > I'm a simple human being that can focus his mind and his eyesight > only on one single thing at a time, so everything has to be serialized > anyway, and no amount of slicing and dicing the stuff will reduce > the amount of processing -- but most of it will incur additional actions > to open it when it is not queued in a single inbox. I think the opposite. Suppose I'm subscribed to WebSec, TLS, PKIX and IETF. There are different threads running in all 4 lists. I come to work in the morning, and see that I have several messages on all lists. If I read them one-by-one in one mailbox, I have to switch contexts for the different threads. If they're sorted into four mailboxes, I can follow one thread, and then another. MUAs can try to sort by thread, but occasionally fail (when people change subjects, like "How to use MUAs (was: subject_prefix on IETF Discuss?)", or when we get a "Re:" equivalent in some foreign language), so I prefer to see them sorted by date rather than grouped by threads. I'd rather make less context switches and just read mails from a single list grouped together, but that's just me. You may have a different way of handing too much email. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf