Two Minute Offense

As coincidence would have it, I came across an article that mentioned BlogLines email subscriptions service… How did I not know this before? I guess because when I started using BlogLines, I pretty much dropped all my email subscriptions because I was so enamored with RSS. Now that I’m back on the newgroup/email list wagon, I will give this one a try…

Set up a Bloglines account, then scroll down to the bottom of the navigation window and select “Create Email Subscriptions”. Bloglines will assign you an email address that kinda looks like garyfugere.13999089@bloglines.com. Why set up a Bloglines email account? Here it is in Bloglines own words:

“Bloglines free email accounts allow people to receive email newsletter subscriptions within their MyBloglines page. This helps to reduce traffic through your primary email inbox and helps to contain the spam menace. A Bloglines email account gives you a trump card when a newsletter breaks the rules of opt-in marketing. When you unsubscribe from a Bloglines email subscription, the email address disappears. You never have to worry about trying to find the unsubscribe instructions for an unwanted mailing list.”

I subscribe to several newgroups via Yahoo and Google. Recently I decided that digest versions of certain newsgroups were not cutting it, so I changed my membership options to get individual emails… Can anyone guess where this is going?

My inbox was pretty much immediately flooded with emails. Of course, these are emails that I want to read… but not that I necessarily need to read right away.

The solution? Gmail makes it easy…

1. Create a label for the group
2. Create a filter to apply to the “To:” address of the group (since everyone sends email to the same address for it to be distributed to the group)
3. In the filter: apply the label for the group, and have it Bypass the Inbox

Now all the email from your various newgroups will be delivered to the different tags, won’t clutter up your inbox, and is much easier to read than the digest format. This is especially true when people manage to use the same subject to continue the thread (for some reason, people like to change the subject line) since Gmail will group them all together for you.