2009/8/30 Mark Williamson [email protected]:
I'm sure all of you can figure out a way of setting up your email client so it can work for you. If not, the archives are available online. There's no reason you have to have this mailing list emailed to you in the first place.
That's an interesting attitude you have there. You're going to just do whatever you like and if anybody requests that you modify your behavior, even if many people ask you to, well, it's their problem and not yours?
If the problem can be solved either by someone changing their email client or by someone else not sending the emails they would like to send, I think the former is the better solution.
I use Gmail, inbox-flooding isn't such an issue for me here. However, when I open a thread and begin to read and find there are 30 messages from you and Thomas Dalton, I tend to skip over them. It's not because you guys don't have anything valuable to say but rather because your wisdom is buried in so much text that I don't quite care to fish it out most of the time unless it's a topic I'm passionate about and want to be sure I got everything.
You and Thomas are obviously very intelligent and often have good insights and definitely a lot to bring to conversations but when the signal-to-noise ratio reaches a certain point it is no longer valuable to me to wade through the swamp of e-mails.
I don't see a problem with you skipping over emails. My emails are generally replies to previous emails, if you have found that a given exchange has lost interest for you you should stop reading it. If you weren't interested in one email you aren't likely to be interested in a reply to that email. I try to always give useful quotes of the emails I'm replying to, so you should be able to quickly find those emails of mine that are about something you find interesting and ignore the rest.