Personally I frequently need to watch certain threads on very high volume lists (eg, LKML). This is what I end up doing at the moment:
1. select "threads with unread". Thunderbird tidily folds each thread into a single line. fantastic.
2. scan the ones that are bold (ie, new threads), to see if any of the messages are relevant, or are from authors that I know are working in the same field as myself.
3. flag the threads I want to watch as "important", so that they stand out in red. Possibly hit "R" on the ones I don't care about to mark them as read. ignore the ones that are just underlined - if I didn't care about them the first time around, I won't care about them the next time.
4. read all the messages from the threads in red
5. hit "catchup"
Of course this usage pattern is just begging for a thread scoring system, like emacs' gnus has. ie, setup key words, authors and other rules (such as, threads I've participated in) that increase a thread's score. Then you sort threads by score and ignore the ones that don't make the threshold.
Personally I frequently need to watch certain threads on very high volume lists (eg, LKML). This is what I end up doing at the moment:
1. select "threads with unread". Thunderbird tidily folds each thread into a single line. fantastic.
2. scan the ones that are bold (ie, new threads), to see if any of the messages are relevant, or are from authors that I know are working in the same field as myself.
3. flag the threads I want to watch as "important", so that they stand out in red. Possibly hit "R" on the ones I don't care about to mark them as read. ignore the ones that are just underlined - if I didn't care about them the first time around, I won't care about them the next time.
4. read all the messages from the threads in red
5. hit "catchup"
Of course this usage pattern is just begging for a thread scoring system, like emacs' gnus has. ie, setup key words, authors and other rules (such as, threads I've participated in) that increase a thread's score. Then you sort threads by score and ignore the ones that don't make the threshold.