Longer version of something I posted in a meta-discussion.

The common sense test is "Is this message really what people expected when they signed up for this list?" Not "Is this issue really really important?" The place where you need to use your best judgement is, "Am I posting this here because it really is the business of this list, or am I exploiting this list to reach more people because my topic is so 'important'?" The two reasons don't exclude each other.

And it doesn't have anything whatever to do with centralization or censorship or authoritarian list nannies. It's about respecting other people's right of self-determination.

It's a mistake to think importance has something to do with whether any particular message belongs on any particular list. Many people choose not to work on the "most important" issue. When I get one of those "forward this action alert to all your friends" type things from three or four different lists, I stop working on it. If it's already the buzz of the blog-o-sphere, it's already covered, and my time is better used elsewhere. If it's current events, I'll probably get it from KPFA or The Nation soon enough.

When I get two or three messages at about the same time, through two or three different lists, with the same subject line, from the same person, I usually delete the whole set. Mailing list topics tend to exclude one another, so if that person thought it belonged in three places, chances are it isn't what I subscribed to any of them for. This works for newsgroups too: if it's crossposted to nine groups, you can be pretty sure it's not worth reading.

I'm not recommending those strategies, just using them to show that everybody gets to, and should, choose their own, and you shouldn't assume other people's email management strategies are anything like yours.

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