Mailing list problems?

[grarpamp]

> find 200 back issues

There's another very useful way fetch back issues for
importation into your favorite mail client for reading
and searching...

rsync -nHaxi bit0.us-west.freebsd.org::FreeBSD-mailarchive/

Mail from the new MMLMJ service isn't
appearing there yet, but the admins are aware of the
need to make that part of the migration happen too.

These full raw archives docs in mbox form are a very
useful resource for new users to sync and import all the
history into their mail clients for reading the back
conversations of the lists they like, enabling full text
search using their favorite local mail client search
tools for threads and strings of interest, debugging, etc.
Users can even, in conjunction with paths configured
in their mail client, sync the entire hier of all lists
of interest, thus having say a monthly or weekly sync
appear automagically in their mail client for casual reading
without needing to tediously subscribe to and manage
all the lists of interest or depend on mail delivery problems.

Those of you who are command line, script oriented,
and text tool based could also appreciate this
form of mail / rsync flexibility.

It's also a great base for people to import into new
public facing mail search services, or if they are
using testing or developing mail search engines that
users could end up using, even being integrated
into the freebsd website someday. Webside mail
search engine development has been fairly
limited accuracy and capability, lots of opportunity.

And more instances of the text of archives being
run and indexed by the big search engines will bring
more search hits to FreeBSD over time :)