E-mail Management Tips - ADF Neopagan Druidism

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by Anthony R. Thompson

The first thing you can use to handle large amounts of list e-mail is mailboxes. Mailboxes are a feature supported by most electronic mail programs wherein you can "move" messages from your incoming mailbox (aka, "inbox") into others. This has the same advantage a filing cabinet has over one huge desktop, namely organization. If your mail program supports something like this (check its documentation if you're not sure), move mail from each list into a corresponding mailbox; on America Online you may have to use PowerMail for the mailboxes feature.

Also, some mail programs (such as Eudora Pro for Mac/Windows, the procmail utility for UNIX) have the ability to do this filtering automatically for you, placing incoming mail into appropriate mailboxes as it arrives; again, check your documentation or contact support staff at your Internet provider to determine if your mailer can do this.

Something else you can try is sorting your mail by various criteria. You might try sorting the mail by sender to read posts in order of who made them, or (probably more useful) sorting by subject to read posts on the same topic contiguously (known as subject "threading"). In Eudora, for instance, you would click on the "subject" column header in a mailbox to do this; in PINE on UNIX you would hit the $ symbol and then the letter o to do an ordered sort in the current mailbox.

You can also set your subscription to a list as digest meaning that instead of getting each individual post as it is made, you will receive a collection of many posts (a digest) periodically (say once a day). That can make it much easier to separate list mail from normal mail, especially if you don't have separate mailboxes as an option. On the other hand, it can make replying to individual posts more difficult, as you don't have the individual post to refer to in your reply. To get around this you could copy and paste (assuming your mail program supports this) the relevant portions of the post you're responding to into your own message, inclosing them in << and >> symbols to indicate quoting.

Whether digest form is worth the trouble depends on how much you post to the list, really. If you only post rarely, I'd recommend using digest because it makes the list mail much more manageable and less indimidating (8 digests or 100+ message? what's scarier?). To set your subscription to digest, mail listserv@lists.adf.org with any subject and a body of "set listname digest" (no quotes, replace listname with the actual name of the list, such as adf-discuss); if you ever want to change it back the command would be "set listname nodigest".

Finally, if you wish to just read the lists on the web rather than receiving them by e-mail, you might try using the Listserv archive for the list. The archive interface will let you "Post to the list" or (when reading individual messages) "Reply". It's somewhat primitive, but it should allow you to read the lists on the web without getting a lot of e-mail in your mailbox.

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About the Author - Anthony Thompson is ADF's Information Manager, a position where he oversees all of ADF's information technology services including the ADF web site, mailing lists, and the membership database used by the ADF Office. He is also the ADF Secretary (formerly known as Scribe) and has served in several other positions on the ADF Mother Grove including Administrator, Preceptor, and Non-Officer Director. [bio] [all articles by Anthony R. Thompson]