Hello, Since handling mailing lists was referred to in my earlier mail here is "part 1" of a tutorial on handling mailing list traffic. I hope other parts will be written by others.
1. If you subscribe to many mailing lists then learning to filter your incoming mail is a must. If you use a shell account and then learn the use of "procmail" or "maildrop" or "sieve". I believe most webmail interfaces also offer some filtering. 2. Distinguish between spam and non-spam. Almost all mailing lists receive spam and so having a spam filter in place is definitely useful. 3. Filter incoming mail into separate folders based on the community involved. One folder per mailing-list is not essential but is sometimes the simplest thing to do! 4. Do not make the mistake of marking "noise" on the list as "spam". You could effectively be cutting yourself off from the list if you do so. The "noise" usually has _specific_ characteristics that mark it as unwelcome. Use your filter to select based on these characteristics (given in increasing order of severity): a. thread (usually given by the "In-Reply-To" or other message ID headers) b. topic c. poster (this is the last resort!) 5. Be prepared to deal with a lot of incoming mail! Since most mailing lists are archived you may wish to stop receiving mailing list traffic (or auto-delete mailing list traffic) when you do not have time to read the mailing list. Regards, Kapil. -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email ilugc-requ...@ae.iitm.ac.in with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
