[mythtv-users] Mailinglist usage ?

[Scott Alfter]

Erland Isaksson wrote:
> My problem is that the only way I have found to answer a question 
> someone else has posted is to subscribe on the mailing list the whole 
> time.

That's no doubt an anti-spam measure to keep offers for "h3rb4l v14gr4" and Idi
Amin's lost fortune from getting posted here.

> This means that I will recieve houndreds/thousands of mails from 
> the mailing list every month

That's the nature of mailing lists.  Filter them into their own folders so they
don't clog up your inbox.  procmail is good at this.

> and the only thing I want to be able to do 
> is answering a question once in a while. I could of course just answer 
> the question by sending a completely new mail to the mailing list

In order to read the question, you would first have to have received it.  Since
you've received it, why wouldn't you just reply to it?

> I also need to either manually every day go through all messages in the 
> inbox and delete all that I know I never is going to know the answer to, 

Takes a few minutes...or if you set your mail reader to "show only new
messages," select all, and then delete, a few seconds.

> or I can do as I do know just keep every message just in case I sometime 
> in the future and wants to respond to it. Obviously this will be a lot 
> of wasted disk space.

The ~560 messages (new and archived) currently in my MythTV IMAP folder take
less than 4 MB.  Since the entire list is archived elsewhere already, there's
not much of a point in saving everything.  Most of the time, there's not much
point in replying to something more than a few days later, as someone else will
most likely have already responded and all involved will have moved on to other
matters.

> So, is there a good way of handling the mailing list that I'm not aware 
> of that would make it easier to work with ?

I don't see where it needs improvement...it works as intended.

> I've read the discussions related to introducing a discussion forums and 
> I am aware of the fact that this doesn't seem to be popular, so please 
> just answer how I can improve the mailing list and don't turn this into 
> a flame war regarding forum or mailing list.

I think this is going to end up turning into one of those anyway. :-) Mailing
lists, thank God, don't work like forums.  That's why we like them better than
forums.

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