The Mail Archive

The Mail Archive is a free public mailing list archive. Rather than requiring the owner of a public mailing list to make arrangements to archive it, anyone can subscribe The Mail Archive to their list (as a user account) in order to archive all subsequent mails appearing on the list.

It was started in 1998 by Jeff Breidenbach and is now also maintained with the help of another MIT graduate, Jeff Marshall. It makes heavy use of MHonArc and other free software. The service's stated goal is to be "free, easy to use, and to do the right thing." It offers per-list searching, and has spam filtering and CSS customization.

Size and expansion of archive

The Mail Archive currently gains several hundred thousand messages weekly. As of 17 September 2008, the service claims inclusion of 56,830,080 messages in its archives, and is subscribed to 8,959 active lists.

As a historical comparison, according to archive.org, The Mail Archive held 5,226,371 messages from 2,697 lists on 29 May 2002. The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology analyzed a sample of 2,561,429 messages from The Mail Archive in November 2003.
 
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