I read a lot of mailing lists. Mostly for various open source software projects. Most of them for work.
It would be cool to have a mailing list summary page. The page would scan the mailing lists, and post the content most likely to need attention. For software projects, this is stuff like:
- Patches (http://ozlabs.org/~jk/projects/patchwork/ does this for patches to some degree)
- urls to bug reports
- urls to pastebin or gists sites that are likely to contain errors or patches
- things that look like error messages (segfaults, stack traces, etc)
- links to SCM (either direct urls, or urls to web interfaces, github, bitbucket, etc)
Mailing list archive software could probably do this. Mailman has support for “topics” that are defined by regex’s. But the interface is poor.
And of course, an RSS feed for all of the above would be nice.
This can actually be accomplished with RT ( http://bestpractical.com/rt ), however it will take some screwing around. Many people manage mailing list subscriptions via RT. Once you get through the basics, you can play with saved searches, or dive into Scrips and Actions to boost the priority of those messages or threads that might be of interest to you.
Interesting area overall :)