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.