[Mailman-Users] Searching all archives, not just one month

[alex wetmore]

From: "John van V" <apps_adm at puny.vm.com>
> Hi is there an easy way to add this feature.  I'm a perl dude,
> not yet doing python...

As far as I know pipermail doesn't index the archives, so the search
interface is implemented using grep or something similar.  Doing this
across all of your archives would put a serious load on the server when
users are doing searches.

I think that a better solution is to use another archiving solution
which indexes your email and provides a nice search engine to the email.
I rolled my own using the Windows 2000 SMTP server and Indexing Service,
but most people here are on Unix so it isn't directly applicable.

To get email from the list into my archive I simply add the archive as a
recipient of the mailing list.  The SMTP server then drops the incoming
email into a directory, and a Perl script picks it up from there and
places it in the appropriate place on disk.  Indexing Service then
notices the new file and indexes it.  Once a month a new directory is
started.

The front end is http://catfood.phred.org.

I know that others have mentioned similar archival systems which were
100% Unix based.  Search the archives of this list.

You'll notice that python.org implements a somewhat similar system,
handing off searching of list archives to an external indexer/search
engine.

alex