Mailing List Archives

[Kent Boortz]

Sean Hinde <sean.hinde@REDACTED> writes:
> The mailing list archives are a fantastic resource, but the search
> engine is slow and cumbersome which means that it's value is
> significantly reduced from what it could be.

Yes, the search engine used actually open up all HTML files to find
the matches, no index is created. Also an unfortunate side effect of
the recent mail address hiding in PNG images break the search on
author. So the search engine don't work that well.

> I wonder if it would be possible to make the raw mbox files available
> for download for each month like many other lists do - mail clients do
> make excellent local search engines.

A heaven for spammers don't you think? ;-) The format the monthly
lists are stored in is in mbox format so publishing them could be done
fairly easy but we need to remove the email addresses somehow.

As an alternative you could use the HTML archive of the lists at
gmane.org and use their very fast search engine

  http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.erlang.general
  http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.erlang.bugs
  http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.erlang.patches
  http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.erlang.distel.devel

You can also read the lists from your news reader.

I don't think they hide email addresses very well but they claim the
robots spammers use to gather email addresses are not that smart yet.
I don't know who put the erlang lists in gmane or who is the
administrator of the erlang lists on gmane. There is an option to add
harder encryption on the email addresses,

kent

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