efficiently following threads in this list?

Hello all,
This is more of a question about mailing lists in general,
but it does touch on XSL, so hopefully isn't too off-topic.

My question is, with the oodles of messages that come on this
list per day, how do you keep track of the threads you've been
following?
What I would like is, when I open my XSL mailbox folder,
for some program to keep track of threads I've been following
in the past (especially ones I started or have posted to)
and highlight new messages in those threads.
(Currently, I page backwards to see which threads I've been
reading, then forwards to try and optically scan for the
ones I'm interested in. It's error-prone and inconvenient.
Often I don't bother.)

Maybe there are some nice email clients that already have
such a feature?  (I'm using Outlook.)
One solution could be to somehow expose the mailbox folder
data to XML, and write an XSL stylesheet to filter the messages,
highlighting the ones I'm interested in. But I don't know
if Outlook can do that easily.

What have you found that works for you?

Thanks,
Lars


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