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I follow a lot of software mailing lists. I used to use Gmail with labels for them, but it still took a lot of time sifting through to the important stuff, and subscribing/unsubscribing felt like a pain. Also, I would end up never actually opening the stuff that skipped my inbox, filling up my account with never-read emails from lists that I might as well unsubscribe from. Then I switched to Gnus in Emacs, and for mailing lists at least it is a world of difference. Scoring in Gnus ensures important emails are at the top, unimportant are at the bottom, I can press "c" to mark all as read, almost all frequently used functions require a single keypress, and subscribing to a new mailing list also typically only requires a couple keypresses, and unsubscribing is "ctrl+k". Real world example: I want to follow any subjects in the high-volume libreoffice-dev list that contain the word "proofreading". I do "^" and search for "libreoffice", click enter to subscribe, enter to open the group and click "I" to add an increase-score-rule ('subject contains string "proofreading"). Next time I open the group, all high-scoring threads will be at the top and I can press "n" to go through them quickly, then "c" to mark the rest as read. You can do this sort of thing with filters and IMAP flags ("stars") of course, but they take so much more time to set up and change and yet only give one level of priority (what if you want certain authors to be more prioritised than others, when talking about proofreading?). If I ever tire of following those subjects, I just ctrl+k on the group to remove it forever, I never have to open an "unsubscribe" page – it's a single keypress, and it's offline. Switching from gmail to gnus for mailing lists was for me like switching from svn to git. Of course, you do need to be an Emacs user already, otherwise you'll probably just be frustrated … |