Re: ukha archives

["David Buckley" <db@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, Stephen <yahoo@s...> wrote:

> I think the archives are really great

<blush> - thanks :-)

> but I just wondered: yahoo does not email me all of the posts
> and when it does they are out of order (replies appearing long
> before the questions, etc). Is the archive immune to this or
> does it too miss some emails because they never get
> sent to them?

The archive is not a special recipient, it gets mailed posts the
same as anyone else does.  Except that there is a dedicated email
address for the archive, which only receives mail - it never sends.
Anyway, if Yahoo goes wrong, I lose posts.  If they arrive in the
wrong order, then so be it.  But I've yet to see more than the odd
case of lost or wrongly ordered posts, far less than the groundswell
of "yahoo is cr&p" opinion would suggest there is.

But, the archive uses my mail service (tex.com) to receive the mail,
and I'm a bit fussy about running a reliable mail service, you could
say that a reliable mail service is a pre-requisite to making this
archive thing work.  The archive retrieves posts (using fetchmail)
from the mail server via POP3, so the reception of mail and the
generation of the archive are decoupled, using POP3 as a store-and-
forward mechanism.

> Is it easy to maintain the archive? What is needed? I think
> it would be useful to have a searchable archive of some of
> the other lists I subscribe to.

If you want a personal archive, run (don't walk) to AskSam Systems,
on www.asksam.com, and discover AskSam.

If you want a public archive, find some software that does it all.
Which is not what I did.  But my excuse was I started this a long
time ago, was younger, and must have been more stupid or desperate
or something.  Although I use MonHArc as the archive software, swish-
e as the indexer, its all held together with tons of stuff I've
written.  If I knew then what i know now.....

David
Archive Maintainer