On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikes...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Marko Vojinovic <vvma...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> One typical scenario is when I am interested in following one branch >> of a thread (i.e. a subthread), while I wish to ignore the rest. In >> KMail's threaded view this is trivial --- subthreads are just various >> branches in the thread tree, and I can always mark this branch as >> interesting, that as uninteresting, etc., and keep following only the >> interesting part of the thread. > > I guess I've never believed that there would be no interesting posts > in a branch with an uninteresting parent or vice versa. Is this a > real statistical observation or just a guess?
Well, I don't know how do you define a real statistical observation, but I described the above scenario from my experience from a couple of mailing lists. What I can say is that it happens often enough to be statistically significant (for me, at least). Otherwise I wouldn't even notice gmail's lack of threading. :-) >> I typically don't have time to read >> through all messages in a well-sized thread. In gmail this is >> literally impossible, and I need to go through *all* messages in the >> conversation, since the interesting branches and unimportant branches >> are mixed together. > > Can't say that I really read everything but unless you are way behind > you mostly see the individual messages in the inbox anyway without > much structure in the unread portion, so you you can decide about most > of it based on subject/sender. You probably check your e-mail much more often than I do. I do it typically once per day, and in one day quite a big number of e-mails gets accumulated on CentOS and Fedora lists (other lists I'm subscribed to have nowhere near as much traffic). Estimating from memory, in 24 hours I receive approximately 15-25 e-mails on CentOS list, and around 40-50 on Fedora list (of course, these numbers may vary widely). That gives me on average around 30ish new posts to look at every day, while I may be interested in just 3-4 relevant ones. If those posts were not sorted properly into threads and subthreads, I would have to look at all of them, which is very time consuming and mostly a waste of my time. When I'm not actively involved in a thread, I make a rule never to spend more than 10 minutes per day for reading e-mail. ;-) So, no, I typically don't look at individual messages, and rarely ever receive them one by one. What mostly happens is that every thread accumulates 5-10 posts per day, and I want to read only those that I know are interesting for me (those that continue the line of conversation I was interested in yesterday, and new threads with an interesting title). In gmail's interface I just cannot distinguish those two types from the rest, within a single thread. Also, on a side note, I filter each mailing list traffic to an appropriate folder, so that posts from CentOS and Fedora lists never actually reach my inbox, but rather get into their own folders. I like to keep the inbox for personal communication, since that typically deserves more of my attention. So when someone sends an e-mail to *me*, it comes into inbox. When someone sends an e-mail to the CentOS list, it comes to the CentOS folder, and is put in its proper place in the branch of the thread. When I want to read CentOS mails, I just switch to that folder, and see all the relevant and irrelevant threads and branches at a glance, without even looking at the text of any individual message. Then I read just the ones tagged as interesting, and mark the others as irrelevant (if they are not marked already). Back in the day I used to read everything, and it took me one hour every day. After some time I learned to be more efficient in e-mail reading. :-) But I believe we are getting too tangential to what the OP wanted to know... ;-) Best, :-) Marko _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
