ewx | Freecycle (Reply)

1. It's very high volume. Fortunately I was warned of this in advance and set up filtering arrangements pre-emptively.

2. You have to mess around with Yahoo's web interface just to subscribe. I know there's a lot of poor mailing list interfaces out there but you can certainly do better than this.

3. The (global) member FAQ suggests combining multiple items into one email (s11). Based on my experience I don't believe this is good advice.

Firstly, some of the responses are at best vague on which items they wanted. In practice this meant I favoured the people making more specific requests and wasn't in the end left with excessive vagueness to guess at, but still, life would have been rather easier without that step.

(When one is giving away useful things for free I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the requester to make some effort to be specific!)

Secondly I'm not convinced that it achieves the intended effect of saving the readers' time. It's stated as cutting down the number of emails but of course message count is only a proxy for the real scarce resource here: human lifetime. Certainly a worthwhile goal, given there's thousands of readers, but only good advice if it actually succeeds.

If all the items offered (among a group of messages) are in the subject lines then you can read them straight off the list of subject lines and carry out bulk deletion: I can read N lines and perform a single UI action to delete them all.

But for each messages where the subject line says "various items" you have to specifically select that message and read the individual line items. That's an extra UI action to select the message, and a pair of visual shifts (from subjects to body and back) for each such message.

So if there are N items and and M "various item" messages, you've got N+M+1 UI actions (including the bulk delete at the end) and 2M visual shifts to process the lot. N's a given, so to minimize reader time and and effort spent all you can do is minimize M.

My immediate personal experience, theorizing aside, was that I quickly started ignoring 'OFFERED: various items' rather than digging into the details of what they were. That doesn't help anyone.

4. You can give away things I thought were unshiftable - my old monitors went out the door last night.

5. It really helps if you get your own address right.