Email simplification through gross hacking

I'm in the process of converting my two Debian unstable boxes (call-with-current-continuation, an AMD64 laptop, and watertown, an IA32 desktop) into Ubuntu Breezy Badger boxes. The goal of this is to stop running Debian unstable, so that I can stop reading multiple high-traffic mailing lists that are at this point largely irrelevant to my life but I feel like I need to keep up on to know about the library breakage of the week.

( gory details; some guru-level clue required )