>Someone on the computing center staff here suggested the
>following procedure, which I offer to other Internet beginners.  I am
 
Procedure works with your mailer, but it won't necessarily with others', at
least not as given, although the principle is sound.
 
In MY mailer, I can pull up all messages sent to Museum-l and scan the
subject lines, pick out the ones that look like what I want, delete the
ones I KNOW I don't want to read, and move the rest into a read-later
folder.  Comes down to more or less the same, though: quick sort and
efficient reading.  That's the only real way to handle this sort of thing.
 
Heavens, I receive about two hundred messages per day or more.  Believe me,
you LEARN to handle mail efficiently!  One hour per day, give or take, and
that includes reading and often answering personal notes.
 
You could always set museum-l index and get only one posting per day giving
all the subject headers; it's then up to you to cull the specific messages
you want from the log.  And hope that the subject headers are accurate --
too many people can't, or at any rate don't, change them when they change
the subject.  Alternatively, make up a list of words that will pull up
topics in which you're interested and daily send them in as a log search, a
bit iffy in an environment that doesn't hew to a controlled vocabulary.
 
If you want to read everything, but you're being charged by the message, go
digest -- ONE message per day, made up of every posting to the list from
the previous day.  It's a pain to do, but it works.  (Actually, for some
lists, I go on digest and save the messages up for a week or so, then pull
them into WordPerfect and do word searches on my topics from the menu.
After I've gone down the list and read what I KNOW will interest me, I go
back and read the list of subject lines at the beginning to catch anything
else.  If those two methods don't combine to cover the range, them's the
breaks ... And it saves me from another hundred or more messages per day.)
 
>Helen Glazer, Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College
 
Mario Rups
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