Re: [asa] Alternative to the Flood of Emails

I signed on this gmail account tonight for the first time in ? has it been 3
weeks?
So no, email != reading every day.

Maybe if I wasn't using gmail it would be easier to follow. Gmail is
horrible.
But, hey, they never lose anything Doesnt matter. You still cant find
anything.

I did try downloading the list into kmail, but the threading was totally
lost and I had 3200 individual non-threaded messages. Thats no good.

I've used many many email programs over the years. None worked for this
sort of list.

Lately I've been attempting to systematically eliminate email from my entire
life.

The pain of email seems to be divided a diverse number of ways:

0. I dont even have a desktop email agent. All my email is web based. You
walk around campus, grab a kiosk, the email is in a web browser under the
glass. Its all you get (unless you buy a laptop.)

1. No search engine in email. Most websites have reasonable keyword
searches.

2. I have to decide where to store everything. Create filters (which
break). Decide where content gets stored. This is labor intensive. By
contrast, forum posters decide where to sort the content - where it
belongs. 100 people sorting 1 message each is vastly more efficient than
100 readers deciding late at night what to do with 100 messages each. The
latter is 100 X 100 decisions. Forums=Order(N), Email=Order(n^2).

3. I have to decide how to back it all up? I once lost 20,000 emails in
a hard disk crash. Email agents dont have a database underneath so they are
hard to back up and manage. Nobody knows how they store data internally. It
varies.

Other misc factors:

My boss taught me to delete all email as soon as possible. Its the only way
to manage workflow.

My son and his friends taught me to instant message all my daily
conversations instead of sending email, the latter which never reaches them
on campus. If you ask a college student for their email they think you are
stalking them. IM is whitelisted. No spam. This is very very desirable.

The #1 really really bad part of email? My friend, the N+1th person,
cant read the thread.
He didnt get the email!!!!! Sending him to an email archive where he has
to click himself to death ? Is that an answer? Really? Such threads should
***scroll***.
Forwarding email to him means I have to store it.

The #2 really really bad part is I want to change which address I use, and
short of unsubscribe/re-subsribe there is no way to do that.

The #3 really really bad part of email is it has content. I only want
notifications (URLS) via email, not content. Notifications can all be
discarded, and can arrive multiple times, and out of order, and information
decisions dont even have to be made. In spite of this there is no data
loss in a web based system.

If anybody read that...?......wonders never cease.

On Dec 12, 2007 8:57 AM, Mountainwoman <hrc54@alltel.net> wrote:

> David,
>
> There is an alternative to removing yourself from the list. Subscribe to
> the Digest version. You will then get one to ten emails each morning,
> depending on the amount of traffic the previous day. You can then either
> read these or delete them and read them on the Internet at
> http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/ by thread (ignoring those of no
> personal interest), date, author or subject and can still reply to any of
> them (as I am doing now). If you Unsubscribe completely, you can't send
> emails to the list. I learned that the hard way a couple of years ago.
>
> I have learned a lot about the interface of science and religion from this
> list in the past several years, both directly and indirectly (via references
> on the list to relevant books and web sites). I would hate to see you give
> up that opportunity.
>
> Paul Bruggink (ASA member and Digest Subscriber)
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Dec 18 02:18:07 2007