Theos-Talk Archives (February 1998 Message tt00375)

I recall reading about some intelligent filters built into mail readers
which can scan incoming msgs for key words and place them in separate
folders or mailboxes. Such a tool can automate some of the tasks of sorting
incoming msgs.

For now, most of the mail readers can sort the incoming msgs based on some
criteria mostly in the header fileds and place the msgs in mailboxes. I use
one such program and mail from different maillists are placed in different
mailboxes. Those which do not satisfy any of the prespecified criteria are
place in the IN Mailbox. This way most of my personal and business msgs are
placed in the IN Mailbox and I attend to them first before I review the
rest of the mailboxes.

mkr


At 07:08 PM 2/24/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Catherine:
>
>>Could the list be broken down into categories perhaps?  This may facilitate
>>sorting of subject matter.  It would permit people with special needs or
focus
>>to pinpoint them and not waste time on extraneous material.  Some of the
>>subjects are misleading and forces one to read the content before realizing
>>it's not useful to the reader.
>
>The automatic support for topics is handled by listserv mailing lists,
>and theos-talk uses majordomo. The reason is primarily economic, it
>costs thousands of dollars a year for a web provider to offer a
>listserv mailing list facility, so I can't convince my webservice
>provider to switch. Majordomo lists, though, don't cost them anything
>to provide, so I'm able to get theos-talk for free (no additional
>charge over my monthly charge for the web account).
>
>It would, as you say, be nice if someone looked over messages, labelled
>and rated them, then sent them on, allowing people to only get the
>messages of types they were interested in. And there have been a
>number of people dropping theos-talk because of the mixed nature of
>the postings, and because they have so much to wade through before
>seeing what they like.
>
>Because there are no controls on the postings of people, and because
>there will always be new people, unfamiliar with any voluntary
>conventions that we might come up with, there will always be
>postings that may be unconventional for the list, that may a bit
>of messages for us to wade through. The only thing that would solve
>the problem, potentially, would be if the list was moderated, and
>the moderator labelled and passed on the messages. The people on the
>list could, in the absence of mailing-list features to allow people
>to subscribe by topic, have an email filter on the subject line to
>discard all messages not having the labels that they wanted. This
>is, though, labor intensive, and there would need to be some volunteer
>to spend an hour a day, day-after-day, and a backup when the volunteer
>was unavailable or sick. Even where someone suitable appear with the
>time and dedication to do this, people would still be unhappy at times
>at the labels attached to their messages, since the labelling of
>messages would be a judgement call, and subject to differing
>interpretations.
>
>The best thing that we can do at the moment is -- as participants
>on the list -- to make sure our subject line is descriptive, to
>cut out long quotes, and to get to the point early on in our
>message, allowing readers the change to quickly decide to keep or
><DELETE> it without a lot of browsing.
>
>-- Eldon
>