== The hassle of email (as compared to RSS)

In my recent [['give me RSS feeds' entry
../sysadmin/RSSForVendorUpdates]] I wrote in passing '[...] these days
email is just too much of a hassle'. Which it is. Let me illustrate how.

To subscribe to new mailing lists these days I need to:

# figure out how to subscribe
# make up a new email address to give the list
# go through a multi-stage subscription dance
# make sure our antispam filters won't eat the list messages
# adjust my filters to put the messages somewhere distinct
# remember to check and read wherever I dumped it

In short, a hassle. Add bonus hassle if I ever want to unsubscribe to
the list; often it's simpler to just kill the address. (Sometimes it's
the *only* way out.)

A lot of this is due to spam. Some of it is due to vendor abuses of
trust (leading to spam). Some of it is just because I no longer have any
interest in sorting my inbox by hand; the volume is too high and my time
is too short.

(Is it any wonder that [[reading mailing lists via newsgroups
blog/GmanePointer]], especially newsgroups that [[someone else runs
http://www.gmane.org]], is popular?)

Compare this to RSS:

* feed readers are good at showing me just updated feeds.
* feeds come pre-sorted from each other.
* subscribing to an RSS feed is easy.
* unsubscribing from an RSS feed is equally easy.
* I don't have to give you any information to subscribe.

It's sad to offhandedly write things like 'email is just too much of a
hassle', and then realize that I mean it. It shouldn't be like this; it
didn't used to be like this. But it is like this now. Sic transit gloria
mundi.