The REEF developer mailing list gets an enormous amount of messages, mainly from three sources:
- Users and developers send email to the list.
- JIRA sends its updates to the list whenever an issue is created,
updated or commented on. - GitHub sends notifications about pull requests there.
On a busy day, this leads to 100 or more emails to be processed, a task that can be eased greatly by using mail filters. In this document, I will describe my setup in the hopes it helps other devs:
Mark mail from yourself as read
Automated emails are triggered also for your own actions, e.g. commenting on a JIRA issue. Hence, you will get an email from yourself with content you just wrote. As that is a waste of attention, you should mark those messages as read immediately. This can be tricky, as you have many identities on the various systems. For me, those are:
- My various email addresses.
- Markus Weimer (JIRA)
Depending on your setup, there can be many more. It is convenient to package them all into one rule, if your email system allows that.
Separate automated mail from human generated email
I find it convenient to separate the mails from different origins into different folders or labels (GMail):
- REEF JIRA contains all emails sent to the list dev.reef.apache.org whose subject contains `jira`
- REEF GitHub contains all emails sent to the list reef.apache.github.com.
- REEF Dev contains all emails sent to the list dev.reef.apache.org whose subject does not contain `jira`
Not all email systems can filter by the `list` email header. In those cases, you have to replace the list-rule with corresponding from: and to: rules, which are somewhat imperfect and will leak messages to your inbox.
Use an email system that generates proper mail headers for threads
Many of our discussions happen in threads with long chains of back and forth. That is reflected in the mailing list archives. This threading relies on the mailing system of all participants to connect replies to the original message via IDs in the mail header. Sadly, many commercial email systems don't do that. Mozilla Thunderbird is an open source cross platform email client that does. It also visualizes the threading structure and can be configured to only show threads with unread messages.