Tim May writes all sorts of stuff, and concludes:
I used the ExI software, and found it an interesting experiment, but I can't say it save me any real effort. The effort of sending the filtering message to the list site, hassling with the formats, etc., clearly outweighed the tiny effort it would have taken to manually press "d" to delete the messages when then appeared.
I only disagree in the most trivial sense with this point. If you weren't required to re-establish your excludes every time they expired, it might not be such a hassle.
I also found it useful to at least spend the 2-5 seconds to see what was being talked about before pressing "D."
[...]
In other words, I find just being real fast on the "D" key is my best way to cope with list volume.
A secondary concern is that some net users do not have very much disk space available in their account, and would rather not have stuff come in in the first place. Once again, I find that if I set up my mailer to delete every C-punk message except the ones from Tim May, Sandy Sandfort, and Duncan Frissell, I get by just fine. They end up quoting people enough that I don't have a problem keeping track of threads. And I'm reasonably sure I haven't missed anything I might be interested in.