> To be honest, I've been in the market and barely able to keep
> up with this
> list.  The volume on this list alone is greater than most of
> the other lists
> I belong to added together.  I just checked and the public
> folder where I've
> been storing these messages currently has over 6000 unread
> messages, and
> that's because I just cleaned it up.

FWIW, it's been a year and a half since I touched a 3000, and I don't see
that changing any time in the near future. But I remain on the list because
of (primarily) the people, and because every once in a while an issue comes
up where I can have meaningful involvement.

As far as "volume" goes: two or three times a day I make a pass through the
new hp3000-l items. If something in the tuple of
   Subject
   Author
   First 2-3 lines in preview mode
doesn't "grab" me, the message gets the "mark read, delete" treatment and is
gone. As a result, I end up actually reading well below 10% of the traffic.
I'm sure that by doing this I miss the occasional pearl, but it also means
that my "hp3000-l overhead" is on the order of 5 minutes per day. As for
keeping unread messages: if it didn't make me want to read it on the initial
review, the chance of my deciding out of the blue to go back and read it at
some later time is close enough to zero to ignore the difference (isn't
there some management-training principle about "Do it, delegate it, or
dispose of it, but only 'touch' any given item once"?). I keep deleted
messages for about 3 months, so if something comes up in later traffic that
prompts me to track the thread back I can do so. But I probably don't do
that more than twice a month.

My (purely personal) bottom line is that the value received from the list,
even though I am pretty much completely detached from the machines, far
outweighs the cost of the involvement.

Steve