Anyone who’s a member of a listserve has spent the summer deleting vacation replies from list members. Here’s my approach to preventing this: Before a vacation I used to manually visit every one of the more than 30 lists I’m on and set my status to No Mail (or unsubscribe if that was my only option). When I returned I had to do the reverse. It sounds pretty stupid when I say it. Then, since I usually wanted to see what I missed, I also had to visit the archives for each list (I was out of luck with those lists that don’t have archives).
Then I wised up and created a separate email address just for my list memberships. My vacation message only replies to my main address, not the list address. When I return I can browse the list messages, or trash them all, or mix and match.
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