I recently discovered that Thunderbird has smart folders. The reason that it took me this long to find this is that it doesn’t call them that, and it hides them in a rather unexpected place. You do a search, and then you “Save As Search Folder”. There are some problems with either the implementation, or how I’m using it, as it takes hours for the folder to populate itself and be useful, but I think it’s because I’m searching too many subfolders.

Anyways, I set up an “Unread” search folder. That is, everything that is not read. This cheerfully told me that I had 35,433 unread messages. That’s quite a lot, and I think it probably means that I should unsubscribe from about 20 mailing lists that I never ever read.

It’s funny how I’m attached to certain lists, even though I never read them. I feel like I’d miss something if I unsubscribe. And yet, if that’s the case, I’m missing stuff all the time. So today I’ll be trimming back on all those lists that flood in messages, but never get read.

Most of these lists, as it turns out, are Perl lists. I seem to have drifted almost entirely away from doing any Perl stuff. But, to be honest, I never read the lists when I was doing Perl stuff. So now I have, in some cases, 4 years of unread messages on some of these lists. Sheesh.