Re: List Archives

[grarpamp <grarpamp@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Why do you ask?

It's much easier for old school non web 2.0 people to use mbox or
maildir text versions.. load the whole thing up in mutt or whatever.
The main benefit is being able to search using search tools you
know work for you across all your mail. Mutt, subject, sender,
regex, perl, etc. Hitting reply actually works :) Online web stuff
is meant for kids and a real pain at that, and if search is provided,
it's pretty limited.

As to boldly going where few have gone before...
The FreeBSD project has it's entire mail archives available... about
16 years and gigs worth, raw as delivered... via ftp and cvsup.
It's fantastic. No worries about dropped mail or bouncing oneself
off the list due to your mail provider failing to have a clue. With
some scripts, it's great for historical search and daily use. And
it integrates into well designed mirroring/distribution pretty
easily.

Also interesting: markmail.org

I might suggest something like that. Split mbox by month, gzip prior
months, current month as a raw live mbox. Rsync will do its efficient
append mode thing on it for mirroring, etc.

As to spam...
There's really no point in attempting to hide addresses/headers in
this fashion. Just as how marc, gmane, etc subscribe to lists, so
do spammers. They're not dumb, they know subscribing yields a
goldmine.  People's machines get hacked and any 'private' contact
list gets sent out to botnets. Or they import you into social network
sites.  The only place spamfighting makes sense these days is at
the mta layer and post mta off in userland somewhere.