[olug] Mailing List Search Engine

[Jay Hannah]

Eric Penne wrote:
> I'm on an email list with approx 100 emails per day which makes it hard to
> catch all the posts.  The list has horrible email searching capabilities.
> They use Yahoo which really sucks in so many ways I can't even stand to
> use it.  The list server is not Yahoo but the server doesn't make the
> messages searchable.  There used to be another site that did this but for
> some reason it stopped working about 1 year ago (prompting the Yahoo
> archive).  A few others on the list have been saying for a couple of years
> that they would start indexing the list but never have.
> 
> Now, I want to give it a go.  What software have you used that does this
> in a nice format and works well?

I'm subscribed to dbi-users and perl5-porters, two of dozens of high
volume Perl lists:

   http://lists.cpan.org/

Both of them use MHonArc to archive:

   http://www.mhonarc.org/

And perl5-porters has a searchable index:
 
   http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/

based on "glimpseHTTP":

   http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/ghttp/

which is deprecated. The authors are recommending moving to WebGlimpse:

   http://webglimpse.net/

Which may do what you're looking for. Both of those mailing lists are
fed into NNTP, though, (as perl.dbi.users and perl.perl5.porters) so I
suspect most people just seach on groups.google.com. (I do.) You may
also wany to read the MHonArc page for their recommended searching
stuff.

HTH,

j