Erik Christiansen <dvalin@internode.on.net> wrote:
Since nearly half the inflow is from two high-traffic lists, only part of which is interesting, I let procmail chuck out stuff I'm not interested in, triggered by subject line.
That's a good work-around for the absence of a "memorized commands" feature in most mail user agents. News readers typically have "kill files" that ignore articles based on thread, subject line or other user-specified criteria. A general statistical classifier such as CRM114 could also help to distinguish "interesting" from "uninteresting" messages (where both terms are relative to the individual user, of course). Then there are reputation systems that can classify mailing list/news articles based on ratings given by other readers with similar preferences. In general, better tools to distinguish the signal from the noise are desirable, especially in conjunction with protocols for which they haven't been well developed, such as RSS, Activities Streams (the new protocol on which pump.io is based), not to mention their proprietary equivalents.