Ah, the list archives. On the one hand, every bit that ever got sent out on
the list is stashed away somewhere. The problem is getting to it and making
it available. One long term project of mine is to go back to the very start
of the autocross and british-cars lists, back when keyboards were carved from
granite blocks, and get all the old stuff on line in a useful format. Yep,
RealSoonNow.
For now, you can get a fair bit of stuff using majordomo's 'index' and 'get'
commands. But for popular lists like triumphs, a month's archive is on the
order of several megabytes, and many mail programs have difficulty presenting
that much stuff to the user. And people wonder why I don't want them sending
500K+ pictures to thousands of folks around the world.
A fair bit of the busier Team.Net lists were at one time archived in a
searchable format at listquest.com. It has been over six months since any new
mail has been accepted at that site, I fear it is another dot com about to go
belly dot up. Which is too bad, since if they provided the service, then I
wouldn't have to do it! One nice thing was that email addresses in the mail
they made available were in a format that made them easy to read for a human,
but difficult for spammers to harvest walking through the web pages. So that
was one less chance for scumbag thievin' spammers to put list members in their
crosshairs. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if various subscribers have
their own "personal" archives which are in reality readily accessible by
various low-life robots collecting addresses. So it goes.
I'd like to have all the stuff from all the lists available on line in a
searchable, browseable format. The current fund drive may be successful
enough to warrant the purchase of another machine to do www.team.net web
service, and I may start working on making the archives available from here.
My main concerns are exposing email addresses to spam collection, and the
additional bandwidth such archives would consume. The DSL line into my office
here at the Fat Chance Garage Intergalactic Headquarters is already busy, not
sure how much more can just be thrown at it with no adverse effects.
So the bottom line is yes, I know the current archive situation is less than
ideal, and yes, I do intend to work on it as resources permit. Stay tuned.
mjb.
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