Open Stack

On Thu, 2013-12-12 at 16:23 +0000, Justin Hammond wrote:
> I am a developer who is currently having troubles keeping up with the
> mailing list due to volume, and my inability to organize it in my client.
> I am nearly forced to use Outlook 2011 for Mac and I have read and
> attempted to implement
> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/MailingListEtiquette but it is still a lot
> to deal with. I read once a topic or wiki page on using X-Topics but I
> have no idea how to set that in outlook (google has told me that the
> feature was removed).
> 
> I'm not sure if this is a valid place for this question, but I *am* having
> difficulty as a developer.
> 
> Thank you for anyone who takes the time to read this.

I currently use the same technique I used to use with LKML (Linux Kernel
Mailing List) before we (finally) got subject specific lists and I could
just subscribe to those instead.

The essential requirement is to have a threaded mail reader with a "mark
thread read" function.  I use evolution where this is ctrl-H ctrl-K.  I
skip through the threads marking those I'm not interested in as read.
Sometimes I do this by subject other times by skimming the thread head
email.  When I'm finished, everything I didn't skip as read is usually
the interesting stuff.

Threads I'm really interested in, I tag with an imap flag which I have
an evolution search folder set on for flag+children (and which pops up
into my mail notification window), so I see immediately any activity on
interesting threads.

I also use procmail on the mail server with a set of heuristics mostly
on subject for things I may be interested in, these get flagged as well,
so they appear in my email notifications in evolution.  Likewise, things
I'm definitely not interested in get tagged as read by the heuristics.

The procmail thing is server side and means you need a sophisticated
mail server, but anything that runs Linux should have sieve which should
be able to do this (not sure about gmail, because I've never used it).

James