Good Hot Topic Filters?

[Steve]

Hey all, I'm running Mozilla 1.7.10 (the full suite), and using composer 
for my primary means of email.
While I love following along on most of the topics here, it has gotten 
more difficult lately to read each post to the mailinglist.
Today I opened composer for the first time in 24 hours, and had well 
over 50 messages.
I'm wondering if there is a way to configure composer or maybe I'll need 
to use a different email client all together, that will allow me to 
"watch" or ignore topics, so that especially in the event of a topic of 
little or no interest to me, that that particular topic may be filtered 
in some way, so it is not visible to me, and to do this, without having 
to create a new rule based on each topic.
Anyways thanks for the info.
FYI I'm running Gentoo