Subject: Overwhelmed by mail??
Date: Jan 9 08:57:21 1995
From: "Michelsen, Teresa" - TEMI461 at ecy.wa.gov



Personally, I love getting all this mail, as there is nothing I would rather
do on my *dreary* lunch hour than read about the exploits of luckier birders
and participate in stimulating philosophical discussions!!

HOWEVER, several people have written in lately to say they're getting more
mail than they can read, and please unsubscribe them.

This message is to say, there are OTHER OPTIONS than totally leaving, as
follows:

1. Send a message to listproc at u.washington.edu with the text line: set
tweeters mail digest
The listprocessor will "bundle" your messages together for easier
reading and you will get less mail

I also recommend sending another message as follows: get tweeters
manual
This will tell you all the things you can do to make your life easier
when interacting with discussion groups

2. Unsubscribe (using the method described in previous postings), but keep
in mind that you can still access and read interesting tweeters
conversations by periodically sending a message to listproc at u.washington.edu
as follows: index tweeters
This sends you an index of archived tweeters discussions. Then you can
decide which ones you might be interested in reading, and you can get them
sent to you by sending the following message to the list processor: get
tweeters tweeters.log####
where #### is the number of the particular file you want to receive. This
way, for example, you can get all the interesting tweeters discussions in
January of 95 at once, organized by topic, leaving out a lot of the more
mundane messages.

It's important to remember that there are TWO addresses for ANY discussion
group. One is the address of the list processor (computer), which handles
all mundane functions (such as subscribing or unsubscribing, sending
archived files, etc.). And the other is the address of the discussion group
itself, where any mail (but NOT administrative requests) should be sent. To
get any administrative functions done, you have to know the UNIX command and
talk directly to the listprocessor. If you don't know the commands, you can
get a list of them using the "get tweeters manual" command described above.

Hope this helps. One thing I have learned since I started messing around on
Internet is it really helps to carefully read the instructions that come
from the listprocessor (it seems like they are often a little different from
each other). You can make your life a whole lot easier and reduce
frustration for yourself and other users if you can learn the basic UNIX
commands that govern most Internet operations (you can do this even if
you're not using a UNIX system). I'm a relative newcomer myself, but I've
found it's not that hard once you try it a few times!!

Teresa Michelsen
temi461 at ecy.wa.gov