On Sun, 2013-05-19 at 05:25 +0200, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
a) Use a mail reader which can actually handle a larger mail volume more sanely. (Filters, or a mail reader which can "kill" threads so that you don't receive future replies on a given thread, etc.)
b) Use Gmane.org to give you an NNTP interface to mailing lists and use a news reader -- high-volume lists is what NTTP and news readers were meant for. (I'm using Thunderbird.) It's trivial to set up and effortlessly lets you follow along in lots and lots of mailing lists without having to set up any mail client magic.
Ok, this time I won't reply off-list. Remember the systemd flame war. Some discussions simply don't belong to Arch general. Even some questions don't belong to this list, e.g. "How can I use dd to backup my Windows?", "Can anybody recommend a good USB coffee cup warming plate?". A _user_ mailing list for similar questions and subjective discussions _must_ be separated from Arch general.
On the other side, a forum allows you to focus on the discussions you really care about, and you can just ignore the irrelevant threads.
You still have to actively go to the specific Arch forums to keep up with replies, etc. There's no unified "show me everything new in all the forums I'm a member of" page where I can go to keep up.
That's a much bigger problem for many mail-oriented users than setting up a filter or two.
Setting up filters is a good idea, when having a _user_ list with threads that don't belong to Arch general. When using a forum, you can't easily post using a MUA, you need to use the online form. For good reasons Arch general is a moderated list. If you take a look at the archive, you can see the advantage. The disadvantage is, that for dumb questions a user list is missing, but users sometimes need to ask dumb questions, take a look at e.g. Ubuntu or Debian mailing lists. Regards, Ralf