In reading and thinking about trying to implement something like Inbox Zero for myself, I'm having trouble deciding how to deal with mailing list discussions. Typically new messages in a discussion can be read on their own, but often enough I want to scan back up the thread to reference an earlier point. If I've been tossing all previous messages in the Archive as I read them, that's harder to do.

Gmail's approach of treating a thread as a single object that moves back into the Inbox as a whole when a new message comes in is a solution to this problem, though it has its own issues and I can't use Gmail for my work email anyway.

Anyone else have a strategy for this situation?