On Apr 19, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Ryan Leavengood wrote: > On 4/19/06, Eric Hodel <drbrain / segment7.net> wrote: >> >> The last thing I need is two copies of every message in my mailbox. >> >> I wish the gateway would just go away. I always see an increase in >> the signal to noise ratio when the gateway goes down. >> >> I also wish the ruby forum gateway would go away, it has reduced the >> signal to noise ratio a bunch, and a bunch of people post without >> context making it impossible to figure out what they're talking >> about. > > I'm normally one to promote free speech, but I have to say Eric makes > a good point here, and I agree. This mailing list has gotten so out of > hand I have almost 2000 unread messages, and I'm pretty anal about > keeping up to date on all my email. It would be well over 2000 if I > hadn't made a concerted effort to keep up with today's mail. I'm not saying either the newsgroup, mailing list or forum should go away, I just think they should be allowed to develop their own separate personalities. > I think the extra effort it takes to actually sign up for the mailing > list and send an email to the right address is a good thing, as it > tends to increase the signal to noise ratio, as Eric says. > > When any Joe can pop into the newsgroup or the Ruby Forum and send a > question in 5 seconds, they are less apt to stop and ask themselves: > "how might I figure this out for myself?" There are years of archives > containing answers to probably 80% of what is asked here everyday, yet > no one seems to search. Part of the problem might be that the scat.rb > interface leaves a bit to be desired (and is slow for anyone not in > Japan it seems...at least for me), but we also have Google Groups (but > of course that depends on the gateway for all messages to be > archived.) I've found scat.rb clumsy but accurate. The biggest problem seems to be nobody knows it exists. Google with the correct site: is also very effective, but nobody remembers that either. > I'm not sure what the solution is here, beyond extremely smart, > SPAM-like filtering in our mail clients to cut down on the junk we > have to read. On that note: how do most people on this list cope with > all the messages? Because it seems like reading all of them would be > at least a half-time job (I don't know, 4 hours or so a day.) I just > don't have time for that, but then there is the concern over missing > the few gems that actually provide good information. Maybe if there > was a Slashdot-like system for rating threads somewhere, then if you > waited until the end of the day you could just filter on highly rated > threads or messages and just read those, marking the rest as read as > well. > > Any other ideas? I've been using IMAPCleanse [1] as part of my email management solution. Once I have a large enough body of flagged messages I'll write a per-mailbox bayesian filter to automatically highlight the messages and threads I should be reading. What I'm interested in now isn't what I was interested in two years ago and probably isn't what most people are interested in. [1] http://seattlerb.rubyforge.org/IMAPCleanse/ -- Eric Hodel - drbrain / segment7.net - http://blog.segment7.net This implementation is HODEL-HASH-9600 compliant http://trackmap.robotcoop.com