[[!meta date="2014-02-05 14:17"]] [[!summary how to read mailing lists with a news reader]] [[!img media/nixos-lores.png alt="" style="float: right"]] [[!tag nixos technology usability]] # motivation normally one would use a email client to access mailing lists (like [1] for instance). doing so has many pitfalls like: * you mix your inbox with the mailinglist * you might fix this with maintaining sieve or .procmailrc filters * you can't access emails on the list which where written before you registered and have to rely to parallel use of email client and for instance the gmane webservice [4] to access all other email threads. * creating powerful filters is tricky and time consuming if you are on several lists however, using a **news reader client like thunderbird and the gmane news group you no longer have to do that**! why am i writing this? as it turns out nobody knows about this feature and i wanted to spread this knowlege further! # how to read mailinglists with a news reader i've been reading mailinglist like forever but at the last nixos hacker sprint someone mentioned a very unique and handy way to read most mailinglists on the web using gmane. let's see how this works. to use the gmane [2] interface to access mailinglists using thunderbird [3] or virtually and news reader client follow the guide at [3]. * the gmane news group address is: **news.gmane.org** * once you added a news group account into thunderbird you can sign up to several mailing lists using a context menu. [[!img media/mailinglist_to_newsgroup_wrapper.jpeg alt="" style="float: none"]] (picture above: shows the nix-dev@cs.uu.nl ml) [[!img media/mailinglist_to_newsgroup_wrapper2.jpeg alt="" style="float: none"]] (picture above: shows the import dialog when selecting mailing lists to subscribe to) [[!img media/mailinglist_to_newsgroup_wrapper3.jpeg alt="" style="float: none"]] (picture above: shows that there are too many mailinglists for one human being to be read in a lifetime ;-) [[!img media/mailinglist_to_newsgroup_wrapper4.jpeg alt="" style="float: none"]] (picture above: shows the webinterface which is parsed by google so that you can find mailing list entries in searches) # conclusion i absolutely love it! pros: * very easy to use * you can access all messages' subjects (when you downloaded all of them, default is 500 only). thus you can do fulltext searches on subjects using the 'quick filter' from thunderbird * you don't have to setup any mailinglist filters like ^List-ID stuff * all your mails to the list are stored in the 'local folder' of thunderbird. so if a mail to a mailinglist was denied you don't have to write it from scratch but change the one you had written already cons: * the first mail to a mailinglist will register you to the list first which means that you are only subscribed after writing the first mail to the list * thunderbird's layout isn't optimal for reading the messages, especially if the messages have a lot of meta-data like big subjects * all mailinglists need to be subscribed to gmane's bot # links * [1] * [2] * [3] * [4]