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I get way too much email. Thousands per day.
And then there's the stuff that takes up most of the time. The private mail.
I still get a crazy number of people sending me mail along the lines of..
"Hi, I have a problem with a kernel panic, can you help.
<backtrace>
This is from 2.4.22 on Red Hat Linux 7.2"
or my absolute favorites..
"Hi, can you tell me how to make 2.6.24 work with Red Hat Linux 9 ?"
I could easily spend my entire day doing nothing but reading/replying/deleting email. And on many occasions have done so (like when I return from flying somewhere). Mondays tend to be 'heavy' mail days too, to dig through the weekend backlog, as well as the incoming flood. I used to take pride in the fact that I'd always reply to someone, no matter how pointless/ridiculous the question was. These days, there's just too much stupid for me to even come close to that and still be productive in any manner. There comes a time when replying to questions about 5 year old kernels/distros gets just a little too tedious.
Between email & god knows how many rss feeds, it's a miracle I manage to get anything done at all sometimes. What are your methods for coping with the information overload?
- Mailing lists I don't read.
I have a problem. Over the years I've accumulated way too many subscriptions to assorted mailing lists. (136 of them according to a quick grep of procmailrc). A lot of them are stuff that I don't even care about any more. Some, I never really cared about anyway. (seriously, what possessed me to subscribe to openbsd lists? nmap-hackers?). I keep meaning to unsubscribe from a ton of them, but when the monthly subscription reminders come around, I'm too lazy, and I just end up deleting them. All this crap goes to folders I don't read anyway, so I'm not too bothered. - Mailing lists I read in their entirety.
Linux-kernel and the various ancillary lists take a serious amount of time to read. I get enough "hey, what's the status of xyz" questions as a distro kernel maintainer that at least having _some_ idea of what is going on upstream is kinda important, so staying on top of this stuff is a fairly large part of my job. I've noticed my involvement seems to be tailing off though over recent months. It's not that I find it less interesting, but I find myself jumping in on random threads of little consequence a lot less. Especially the really pointless ones. "OMG, Someone said something wrong on the internet" isn't as fun as it was ten years ago. - Mailing lists I skim by subject.
Lots. Various Fedora lists for eg. If I'm overwhelmed with other stuff, I do a 'mark all as read'. This happens more than I'd like, but again, there's enough volume here that I could spend all day just reading mail. - Red Hat internal lists.
The traffic volume on some of our internal lists is ridiculous. Though for most of them the rule of thumb seems to be that the higher the volume of traffic, the less point there is in reading any of it. Subject skimming is the only way I manage to get through this stuff at all. - automated mails.
Mails from bugzilla. Mails from cron. Mails from the build system. CVS commit mail. Mail from various automated checkers. I get almost as much mail from computers as I do people. 99% of it gets deleted unread. Mutt colours the interesting ones for me so I know if its worth reading or not. Some of these take a long time to process each one too. Take bugzillamail for example. Each one requires reopening the bug, gaining the context again, possibly replying, possibly even looking at code, making changes etc. A single bugzillamail can cause an afternoons worth of activity. - spam. Way too much. spamassassin catches 99% of it thankfully. Though I still feel the need to once a month go fishing through the months spam folder just in case there are false positives. (There nearly always are, usually someone sending me html mail which I haven't added to my whitelist). Also in this category, the thousands of joejob backscatter bounces that end up in my inbox several times a month. I'm getting good at crafting Russian regexps.
And then there's the stuff that takes up most of the time. The private mail.
I still get a crazy number of people sending me mail along the lines of..
"Hi, I have a problem with a kernel panic, can you help.
<backtrace>
This is from 2.4.22 on Red Hat Linux 7.2"
or my absolute favorites..
"Hi, can you tell me how to make 2.6.24 work with Red Hat Linux 9 ?"
I could easily spend my entire day doing nothing but reading/replying/deleting email. And on many occasions have done so (like when I return from flying somewhere). Mondays tend to be 'heavy' mail days too, to dig through the weekend backlog, as well as the incoming flood. I used to take pride in the fact that I'd always reply to someone, no matter how pointless/ridiculous the question was. These days, there's just too much stupid for me to even come close to that and still be productive in any manner. There comes a time when replying to questions about 5 year old kernels/distros gets just a little too tedious.
Between email & god knows how many rss feeds, it's a miracle I manage to get anything done at all sometimes. What are your methods for coping with the information overload?
Current Music: The Crystal Method - Weapons of Mass Distortion
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