One great change that has been made to list-serves over time is now you can edit them.
I am signed up for a writing list-serve where I get writing jobs sent to my inbox daily. I had originally signed up to receive emails right after group members sent them. On some days this would mean two or three emails in my inbox, on others 30. Now most list-serves offer the option to edit when you receive messages. You can choose between getting every single message instantly, a daily digest will all of the emails for the day contained in it, or never get emails at all and check a website for archives of all of the groups correspondence.
For most of my list-serves I have chosen the daily digest option. Daily digest gives me a list of all of the day’s emails with links to read them. I can scan through everything that was sent for the day and decide if anything interests me, if it does I click on the link and read all about it.
Unless you have tons of time on your hands, or are part of a very small list-serve I highly recommend updating your preferences to daily digest. This allows you to be part of more groups on the web, and read on the emails you want to read not the junk sent by everyone else.
Before I had discovered the daily digest option I had decided to remove myself from several groups entirely. It was just not worth having to sort through all the junk I received everyday to find that one mail in thirty that was actually useful to me.
If daily digest is even too much for you many groups today also offer a web only version of their group. With a web only version you can check in on the group when you want, and have full access to read all of the emails sent between group members, but you can’t physically receive any of them in your inbox. I do this for a few groups that I’m interested in, but not so interested I want to read them everyday.