On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Jon Hylands wrote:

> On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 16:01:39 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
> 
> > I don't subscribe to the list by email any longer (though I spent 
> > the past year doing so) because I found it too cluttered an 
> > experience, regardless of whether I used the digest or dealt with 
> > individual emails. Following threads was very difficult at best and 
> > filtering out topics in which I was not interested proved all but 
> > impossible.
> 
> I think your real problem is the email client you use probably doesn't
> do a good job.
> 
> I use Agent, which is a Windows only product, but it does a fantastic
> job of dealing with email lists. It basically treats email lists
> exactly the same way as usenet. The messages are all threaded, and
> show up in indented lists by thread. You can navigate through the
> unread messages with single keystrokes. You can selectively ignore an
> entire thread (plus all future messages to that thread) with a single
> keypress - this basically marks the messages on that thread as being
> read when they are retrieved.
> 
> Its a browser interface, so no windows get opened or closed when
> viewing messages. It is multi-threaded, so you can be retrieving email
> and reading new messages at the same time.
> 
> Plus, Agent can handle the volume of the Squeak list with no problems.
> I've been on the list for the past 11 months, and I've got something
> like 15,000 messages in my Squeak folder.

Following on Jon's suggestion - I have a tool that pipes all my email into
a Filemaker database, one record per message, one file per month.  This
gives me all the power of a database for exploring my mail with none of
the issues of deciding what to put where - again depending on my purpose a
given piece of mail could belong to dozens of different categories.

R.