Avoiding message overload by tagging messages

From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-08-04 10:14:39

One of the occasional complaints about the boost mailing list (and lots of 
other lists, too) is "message overload".  Too many uninteresting 
messages.  The problem is that the definition of "uninteresting" is in the 
eye of the beholder.

(Totally off-topic messages uninteresting to everyone are a separate 
issue.  eGroups gives us some tools to deal with these; we can ban a 
particular poster, we can require moderation of the first posting from a 
new member.  Let me and Dave Abrahams know if you think we should be doing 
so.)

One way to deal with message overload is to have separate mailing lists 
for   boost sub-topics.  I don't want to do that for a bunch of reasons you 
can probably anticipate.

Here is another suggestion:  For messages on certain agreed upon topics, 
always include a tag in the subject so that readers can filter those 
messages automatically for special handling.  Some email programs use the 
term "rule" rather than "filter".  Special handling might be to put the 
message in a special folder or simply to trash it.  A tag is simply an 
agreed upon word unlikely to appear in message subjects on other topics.

For example, I've set up my email program to automatically place boost 
messages with "thread" in the subject to an email folder called "Boost 
Threads".  That's because I'm interested and want to segregate and save 
these messages, rather than the reverse.

Two topics which bore some readers are the CVS repository and fixing 
libraries to work with broken compilers.  So we might agree on including 
CVS and CFIX (or similar) in the subject lines.

Is this a worth a try?

Any better ideas?

--Beman