For the record, my personal arrangement for years has been to read most
open source mailing-lists using GMane, on a NNTP reader separate from my
main mail client. This works fine when I don't want to read open
source-related e-mails :-)

And if you're not an NNTP person (anymore), filters in Gmail (and I assume other mail readers/apps) allow you to sequester mails into separate folders which you can ignore if you like.

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