boilerplate response about mailing-list traffic volume

W3C mailing lists have neither a digest option nor a "no mail"
option you can set. I'm not sure (I've not been at the W3C all
that long), but think this might be by design.

As far as discussions about HTML5 go, there are two main mailing
lists where discussions focused on HTML5 take place: the W3C
public-html mailing list, and the WHATWG mailing list.

  http://lists.whatwg.org/listinfo.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org

The WHATWG mailing list actually existed long before the current
W3C working group was created, and though as with public-html,
list traffic on the WHATWG list can also be quite high at time,
it tends more to focus on specific technical discussions (a good
number of active participants are people like UA implementors and
people who have built HTML5 parsing libraries and test suites).

As far as the public-html list goes, I guess the main practical
way to deal with the list volume is to use some client-side
filtering in your mail client (or if your current mail client does
to do filtering well, to consider switching to one that does).

If that doesn't work for you, there is always the option of just
leaving the group[1], and never any hard feelings on either side
about that. Because we all have only so much time in the day and
investing it in trying to keep up with discussions on public-html
may not be the best choice for you in your case.

  --Mike

[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/01/pp-impl/40318/join

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/
http://sideshowbarker.net/