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.
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