I have encountered several people over the last week who have simply lost interest in the Alt.Net mailing list due to the overflow of information.  Simply to much information to keep up with.  So I asked them to show me how they were utilizing the mailing list.

For the most part, the people that were just over whelmed were going to the Yahoo group and responding through the portal.   I will be honest, Yahoo make the less then an enjoyable experience.  So here is what I recommended to them.

Use GMail!

By utilizing GMail's ability to automatically group discussion threads, allows you to easily view the discussion from where you left off.  If you have already read a message GMail collapse the entire block only exposing unread message threads.

OK, so how do I do this Joe?

< This is assuming you have a GMail account set up />

1. Navigate to the home page of the Yahoo group, for instance: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/altdotnet/
2. Click on the "Edit Membership" link
3. In Your Contact Information, under Email Address if your GMail address is not listed there add it at this time.
4. For the Message Delivery Make sure that "Individual Email" is selected (if you don't do this you are not going to enjoy what you receive in GMail)
5. Click on "Save Changes" at the bottom of the screen.
6. Log into GMail
7. Once you receive your first email from the list, open it.
8. Click on the "More Actions..." drop down
9. Select Filter Messages like these
10. At this point the text box "Has the words:" should contain "listid:(<altdotnet.yahoogroups.com>)" or what ever list group you used.
11. Click on the "Next Step" button
12. Check off "Apply the label:" and in the Choose label... drop down select "new label" NOTE: If you already have a label you would like to use, go ahead and use that one!
13. Name the Label "AltNetStuff"  or what ever you want to call it.
14. Click on the "Create Filter" button.
15. We are not done yet.  You should be on the home page of GMail now.  The Labels List should be in the left hand margin of the screen if it is not expanded, please expand it.
16. Find the "AltNetStuff" label and click in the gray box to the the right of the label.
17. Select a color.
18. Now you are done!

Now when ever a new topic is added to the list an email will be sent to you inbox and it will be flagged with the label "AltNetStuff" and a pretty color is added to catch your attention.  If you want to respond to a topic all you have to do is simply reply to the email.

Please be courteous to those of us that use Smart Phones to keep up with the group by doing the following:

1. When replying to ANY message make sure to perform the following keyboard short cut: ctrl-shift-A > Del
• Now the message should be empty.
2. If you need to reference any previous message simple copy the text that is pertinent to your reply and at each line prefix it with ">"
3. Navigate to the end of your message.  Just to make sure you didn't forget to clear the box before you started typing perform the following key combo: ctrl-shift-end > Del

Hopefully this gets people reengaged in the list and we will help each other grow this great community.