One of the mixed blessings of technology is the ease of communication. To send an email is quick and easy, but receiving them can develop problems. Spam is, of course, a major problem, but even GOOD emails can be difficult to handle. No matter what your profession, there are listservs or email-based mailing lists that can help you continue to develop professionally and to stay in touch with others in similar positions. Depending on the lists you subscribe to, you could get a couple of emails a week, or you could be flooded with masses of emails every day. Even if you set up “rules” or “filters” to make different lists’ messages go directly to particular folders, you still have to check on them, read some, and delete them all.

Enter Bloglines!

You may already have heard of Bloglines as one of the best free RSS aggregators out there, and it is. But another incredible feature (”the best thing since sliced bread” said a co-worker of mine) is what Bloglines does with email subscriptions. You can subscribe to your mailing lists through Bloglines, and then allow Bloglines to handle all the traffic. You can choose to view the complete messages, summaries, or just the subjects of the posts, which allows you to skim the more prolific lists quickly. When you log in, it tells you how many unread messages there are on each of your lists. And best of all, you don’t have to delete any! The next time you visit, all the previous messages are gone and only new ones remain! You can still access them, or even mark them “Keep New,” but you don’t have to go through and delete them.

And since Bloglines is entirely web based, you can use any browser or OS, and you can check your Bloglines RSS feeds and email subscriptions from any computer with Internet access. No more hassles with mailing lists! Subscribe to your heart’s content! It’s easy to manage now.