Archiving Mailing lists

Archiving Mailing Lists at NCSA

So, you want to archive your email lists?

No problem! Through the miracles of hacking and funky perl scripts we're proud to offer archiving services for any mailing list at NCSA. We use the MHonArc archiving software written by Earl Hood to write the files out into AFS. These files can then be accessed by our Web servers.

Sounds great! How do I join?

It's easy! There are two possible ways: one is to subscribe archiver@ncsa.uiuc.edu to your mailing lists. If it's an NCSA-administered list and you're afraid that you might accidentally unsubscribe the archiver, you can send mail to help@ncsa.uiuc.edu and ask the administrators to embed the archiver directly into your majordomo configuration.

Once you've completed this step, you'll also need to send mail to help@ncsa.uiuc.edu asking for your list to be added to the master configuration file. Without this crucial step you'll just be annoying the email administrators because of all of the bouncing mail. If the list isn't administered at NCSA they may ask you for a sample message from the list, so be prepared!

I'm a privacy freak. How can I keep other people out of my archives?

There are a couple of solutions. We can archive the list on the public NCSA Web server, accessible as

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/lists/

or they can be archived on the internal Web server at

https://internal.ncsa.uiuc.edu/lists/

If the internal server is chosen, you can limit access to your mailing list any subset of Kerberos account holders at NCSA through a .htaccess file. That file will be located in

   /afs/ncsa/web/internal/htdocs/lists/[yourlist]/.htaccess

If you need to make the archives available to non-NCSA Kerberos account holders, your list will need to be on the public servers. If you need privacy, the only thing that we can do is assign one password for the entire list; just give that password to anyone that you want to access the archives.

We can also archive to other Web servers that serve content out of AFS. If that's the route that you want to take, please let us know which server and directory you want things archived to and whether or not you want the archives made public.

OK, but some of my users don't want their emails archived.

Anyone who adds either of these headers to their emails won't have them show up in the archives:

   X-no-archive: yes
   Restrict: no-external-archive

We also suggest that you add some introductory text to your mailing list letting people know if it's archived.

Who do I make the check out to?

Nobody, it's free! But you can always take me (Christopher Lindsey) out to lunch if you really feel compelled... :)

What changes will the future hold for the archives?

We plan on "prettying" up the archives and adding a search engine in the near future. If you have your own MHonArc resource file that you'd rather use, let us know and we can put it into place for you.