Gmail as Mailing List Aggregator

I finally got an invitation to test drive the Gmail beta. I run my own mail server so I doubt I will use gmail as my primary address but with the 100 GB mailbox size, filter support, and labels (similar to virtual folders in Evolution) it might make a really solid mailing list aggregator.

I'm currently subscribed to nearly 50 mailing lists, some of which have heavy traffic with low signal to noise ratio (fedora-list for example). Being able to organize by list and flag potentially interesting items becomes an absolute requirement unless you have hours upon hours for sifting.

So the primary benefits I see in using Gmail as a mailing list aggregator are as follows:

  1. The 100 GB mailbox means I should have all the mailing list messages I've ever received in a personal archive. Most public mailing lists have a web accessible archive but they generally suck and it would be nice to have them all in one place.
  2. Said mailing list archive is searchable using some of the best search technology available.
  3. The humble P300 sitting in my living room running my mail server will have about 90% less to do.
  4. I much like the idea of having an email address specifically for mailing list interaction as mailing archives seem to be pretty popular for email address harvesting. Gmail should have pretty good spam filtering at some point in the near future.

There may be a few issues; I've yet to dive in enough to know for sure. The filtering seems a little light on the features. You can filter by all the basic attributes: To, From, Subject, and Body. Sometimes mailing list software does weird stuff with Tos and Froms. I've found that filtering on the Mailing-List mime header as Evolution allows you to do seems to be the only really consistent method for filtering. Maybe the Gmail filters will support a “Filter on arbitrary mime header” option in the future.

UPDATE:  June 24, 2004 6:53 AM

After heavy use over the past few days I can say that Gmail makes a very good mailing list aggregator. The only thing I'd really like to see is a threaded view when reading a message. Messages in a thread are grouped together beautifully but sometimes I'd really like to see the hierarchy.