LawLibTech

Here are the advantages in a nutshell:

• Spam - Posting to mailing lists such as law-lib can cause a deluge of spam if email addresses are displayed in the list archives and the archives are publicly available via the web. (This is not always the case, of course.) Bloglines email addresses are essentially disposable, so if you start receiving spam you can quickly and easily delete the address, create a new one, and start again.
• Easy Viewing: In the past I've subscribed to several email discussions lists in digest format, but typically the digest leaves much to be desired. It's not always easy to jump to the email you want to read, and if an email message is in html format, it's just a jumble. Using expandable headings, Bloglines essentially creates the digest for you, and it's very easy to view those emails that are of interest to you.
• Out of Office: When you go on vacation, there's no need to unsubscribe or postpone.
• Inbox Clutter: Your inbox isn't inundated with mailing list email, obscuring the urgent message from your boss.
• Rejection: Your spam filter won't reject list messages that you actually asked for and would like to receive.
• Unsubscribe: If you can't figure out how to unsubscribe to a particular mailing list, just delete the email address and you're done.

Have I convinced you? Okay, then, start your Bloglines account, and I'll explain how this all works.

• From your MyBlogs page, select "Manage Email Subscriptions" from the bottom left frame.
• Click on "Create New Subscriptions" at the bottom of the "Manage Email Subscriptions" page. Your MyBlogs page will now show your new email addresses in the right frame with all your other subscriptions. Note that email subscriptions are marked with a B instead of a folder.
• From your MyBlogs page, click on "Manage Subscriptions" to change the name from the cryptic email address to something more recognizable. I like to name them for the mailing list I am going to subscribe to using that address, i.e., Web4Lib. I use a different email address for each mailing list.
  TIP: If you can't see all the available options in the right frame where the "Name" field is displayed, click on F11 to go to your browser's full screen mode and expand the frame. You should then be able to see everything including the rename option.
• Go to MyBlogs again, and click on the subscription name. Click on "Send Email" from the right frame, and, following the instructions for subscribing to that email list to start your subscription. You can also use "Send Email" to post a message to the list.
• If you want to know whenever a new message arrives, consider installing the Bloglines notifier.

Here's what law-lib looks like in Bloglines with the expanded headings option:
(This is an image, so the email addresses shown above cannot be harvested by spammers.)

That's all there is to it! No, no, don't thank me. Thank Bloglines.

For more on Bloglines see:

RSS Tutorial Part III: Using Bloglines

RSS Tutorial Part IIIA: Bloglines Revisited - New Display Feature!!