Re: Mailing lists and news archiving

[(Chris Beggy ) news@kippona.com]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> ephemeral they are.  Some of them are archived here and there,
> but the archives go away or move or don't work.

Wow, this is a great topic.

http://www.mail-archive.com does a good job of this, and we can
even read these as gnus groups with nnwarchive!  For now,
mail-archive.com is a gift from Jeff Briedenbach and VALinux.  In
the future, who knows?  We've already lost deja-news.com, which
was archiving usenet in a similar way.  Some people lost faith in
VALinux's approach to http://sourceforge.net and are cloning it
at http://savannah.gnu.org, which is another indication.

> News, on the other hand, don't really go away if you don't run
> expiry.  If more people are interested mirroring, you just start
> feeding.  Or mirror using other means.
>
> So I'm wondering whether I should start setting up mail-to-news
> gateways for all the mailing lists I'm subscribed to.  And, of course,
> any other mailing lists that people would want me to store.

I do this now for all of the high volume lists I subscribe to,
because I *want* expiry after a while, and I want to reduce
multiple subscriptions.  I only distribute them locally, for now.

> Does this seem like an OK idea?

As long as you establish them as moderated newsgroups, it should
be OK with the list owners. I don't know about the privacy
concerns, though.  Moderation and privacy are sticking points and
differences between mail and news.

> The mailing lists I would gateway would be, at least:
<-- lists snipped -->
> Is this a good idea?  A bad idea?  And what would the hierarchy be
> called? 

I *already* think this is a great idea for distribution.  Do you
have the disk space for archiving these, though?  In addition,
are newsreaders really good at perusing archived groups?  Even
with gnus, I know only how to select the N oldest articles or M
most recent articles, but I can't get range N to M.  (I'm just
kidding. I'm certain gnus can do this, but what about other
newsreaders :-) )  Downloading the *whole* archive isn't a good use
of resources.  Might it be better to clone mail-archive.com's
approach for archiving?

Your approach, the approach of especially interested people
archiving lists/groups they love, rather than the "archive
everything" approach of deja-news can succeed in the long run.

I'm happy to peer for feeds, but I need to have an estimate of
the rate of archive growth before I commit to /no expiry/ on those
groups.

Maybe Russ or somebody with deja-news.com experience can shed
light on these issues. 

Chris