Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamburglar | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what do you do when you run into an OSS project which requires you to subscribe to a mailing list in order to ask a question? I find the friction of this high enough that I end up staying subscribed forever (and filtering the mail) rather than unsubscribing and possibly having to resubscribe later. I'm glad gmail doesn't have a quota for email bandwidth...

View on HN

"Out of curiosity, what do you do when you run into an OSS project which requires you to subscribe to a mailing list in order to ask a question?"

One massively helpful resource for this is gmane. You sign up for the mailing list and disable the delivery of mail (usually you must be subscribed to the list to post a message), then use gmane to read messages (hopefully using your favorite NNTP client instead of the gmane website).

http://gmane.org/

I haven't had the problem, but the mailing-lists I've come across are more often than not ran on mailing-list systems that let me pick the emails I want to receive (e.g. Google Groups). I typically go for none or just replies to my own posts. If I want to see what's up I check the site.

But if your filter archives, labels and marks as read the emails, you're fine because your inbox is cleared of them but you still have the ability to check the activity.

I filter to a label and skip inbox. Once in awhile I scan the list (rather lower volume at this point) and see if there is anything I can help with, then I select all for that label and delete.

I always use a temporary mail address : http://jetable.org/en/index

Reply on news.ycombinator.com