I've unsubscribed from issues@ because I can't handle the sheer volume of e-mail from it. In HDFS, they have newly-created issues get sent to dev@hdfs and people can then choose to watch them for subsequent notifications. Notifications will also get sent to dev@ when the JIRA is closed, but not for any of the updates in between. I've found that to be a superior way of staying afloat of the issues I am interested in. What do we think about moving to that system for HBase?
Regards, - Dave
