> Reasons for emailing all undergraduates include event announcements for student groups and departments, flame wars, and occasionally lost items. In contrast, the kinds of emails sent within a dorm mailing list include, at the top of my inbox right now, parties, house meetings, and foodmobs to restaurants in Boston; decisions about when to turn off the heating for spring, invitations to test food experiments, and a memo to the person who left their clothes in the middle washer; and requests for empty gallon jugs, superglue, cooking scales, male-to-male audio cables, MIDI cables, 120V twist lock connectors, funnels, and hairdryers.
I can only imagine the volume of email that entails; how do people deal with it? I would guess that these days the mailing lists are through Google Groups so you can at least turn off emails and use the list as a forum, but I doubt most would know or bother to do that and let themselves drown in email.
Gmail makes it very easy (via the "Filter messages like these") to filter all messages from a mailing list. You can apply a label and skip the inbox so you just browse the list when you need to.
This is exactly what filters are for and why every decent MUA has them. You just filter each list to a folder, or all the lists into a folder, and read them there rather than in your inbox.
I can only imagine the volume of email that entails; how do people deal with it? I would guess that these days the mailing lists are through Google Groups so you can at least turn off emails and use the list as a forum, but I doubt most would know or bother to do that and let themselves drown in email.