At 11:41 AM -0600 2/15/04, Ron Nossaman wrote:
>The subscribers choosing not to contribute to the blather in the OT
>political crap are not necessarily oblivious to it. Some of them are
>seriously weighing educational benefits against the volume of
>shoveling necessary to get to them.
The ones who take advantage of the power of filters don't have to
waste their time shoveling. It should be pointed out that to get to
the real gold on this list, it's not necessary to read every single
post coming in from this list, nor is it necessary to delete every
post deemed worthless. I let them all pile up in the hard drive. Any
email client app worth its salt acts like a good database. Sort the
posts by subject if you want to read an entire thread. Sort the
mailbox by name if you're looking for a comment by someone in
particular, and pre-sort by date if you have an approximate idea to
the nearest month when it was said. When you find something you want
to be able to retrieve fast, tag it in the priority field.
Just because my PTx mailbox may be 60% fast food containers, beer
cans, and cigarette butts doesn't slow down my access to what I know
is in there. I've got a PTx mailbox going back to early AUG 2002
which is ~125MB in size. It's not cumbersome in sorting. It also is
about 0.3% of my hard drive space. (These days, 40G is not enormous.)
Assuming I could clean out the above mentioned 60% junk, that HD
space would would drop too 1/8 of 1%. But oh, the work to do that.
No, it's far easier just to leave it lie.
So four pieces of advice, to all of those who find the list too much work:
1.) Don't expect yourself to read every single post. Learn who posts
the valuable stuff and who posts the fluff. If you're not sure
whether a particular thread is one which you should have been
following with each post, drop into it every once in a while to check
it out. Learn to recognize goofy threads by their subject lines. And
for heaven's sake be grateful to those of us who do bother to mark a
subject "OT".
2.) If you can't be expected to read every post, then you can't be
expected to weed the keepers from the flushers. So don't worry at the
growing size of your PTx mailbox, it won't prevent you from panning
the real gold.
3.) If you don't know how to set up a filter, speak up. For every
person who doesn't know how, there at at least two running the same
OS and email client app who will step forward to help out. I've seen
this happen several times in the last few years.
4.) Don't take the list in digest form unless you are absolutely
compelled to. The digests do not save you any HD space, nor do they
download any faster. What they do do is to obstruct the database
capabilities of the email software which are vital to enjoying the
wealth of knowledge here. If there is an advantage to digests over
individual posts, I'd like to be informed of it.
Oh, and the other one about filtering out a particular person, if you
really decide they're a consistent waste of your time.
At 8:50 PM +0100 2/15/04, Richard Brekne wrote:
>Hmmmm... well there's plenty enough blather to shovel through of all
>sorts that has nothing to do with politics or religion. If its just
>a matter of weighing the education benifit against the amount of
>shoveling necessary to get through it all.., then I think more then
>a few should be a bit wary of pretencious moralistic preaching.
"Great post, Bob"....."thanks for your suggestion, it
worked"......"you owe me a beer, I'll collect at the
National"...."Hey, how 'bout them Brooklyn Dodgers"..... and on and
on. (Not to mention one of the newer people here who thinks this is a
chat room instead of a mailing list.)
Like I said, even if we could decide on a standard for acceptable
contributions to this list, it would be a part-time job for a human
being to moderate it, and an impossible one to leave up to a
computer. I happen to enjoy the human dimension brought in with all
the OT stuff, and it certainly doesn't get in the way of my getting
at the real "on topic" gold on this list.
BB
"The truth is inside you, Don Octavio. I cannot help you find that."
...........The mother of a delusional patient to his psychiatrist
in "Don Juan DeMarco"
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