(OT) How to follow a mailing list with very high activity (like this one here)?

[M <Elwood151@web.de>]

This is off-topic, but I hope that someone can give me some good advice:

During the last years, I'be become a real org-mode fan and I want to stay
current and be active in the great org-mode community.
I've subscribed to the orgmode mailinglist about 1,5 years ago and so I have
>17.500 mails in my inbox.

You really have to be organized very well to deal with so much information!
Is there a tutorial somewhere for good approaches, how to participate in
such a list (without doing it as a full time job)?

IMHO, there must be some process like:
Review each new topic
 -> if interesting/relevant mark it to follow what happens,
 -> else if not interesting/relevant, then ignore the following posts.
The interesting stuff should also be stored to be available later for
reference...

How do you handle that?
Are there tools which make such a process easier?

Up to now I just used my old mail client Microsoft Entourage 2004 on OS X
for storing those mails.

Kind regards

Martin