I was reminded this week that people have short attention spans.
IBM has released IBM Verse and one of the major features that IBM tours is muting threads or conversations in e-mail. That is, basically, if you are tired of being on an e-mail thread, you can “mute” it so that it does not appear.
This feature is not new.
From May 2010, I present to you how to mute threads and conversations in GMail and Outlook.
My fraternity mailing list is home to a great group of people, including some great entrepreneurs and some great investors. But when you get 400 opinionated MIT grads on a single mailing list, and the topic shifts to anything controversial, the discussion might explode. We’ve had well over 125 emails come through in the last three days after someone brought up the health care bill, and several folks have emailed to get off the discussion list list.
Don’t do that! Instead, use these super easy techniques to mute or filter the discussion out of your Inbox in less than 30 seconds. It’s faster than removing yourself from the mailing list, and better too, because when this discussion peters out, you’ll still be on the list in case something interesting comes up later.
Having some sort of parity with GMail and Outlook is good. Touting this as “new” is a bit disingenuous.
Thanks for the reminder, vowe.
Gregg Eldred 
I am sure that some time was put into looking at features in GMail and Outlook (as well as Zimbra), and one was the ability to mute a thread. In the Notes client, you could add a rule to filter such messages.