ListArchives

This is a brief evaluation of eight web mailing list archivers: Hypermail, ezmlm-www, Gmane Loom, Lurker, MHonArc, mlmmj, msgcab, and Pipermail. Each has a picture of what the output looks like, links to sample pages, and notes.

Keeping in mind that for many of these programs I don't know their dependencies and how easy they are to install and modify, these are my recommendations:

1. MHonArc. Benefits: Standalone, has the features we want, looks to be easy to modify, has users. Drawbacks: No release since 2006, unknown security record.
2. Keep using Hypermail and hack it for what we need it to do. Benefits: Easier migration, already does most of what we want. Drawbacks: Even older (2003), output not as nice as MHonArc.
3. mlmmj: Benefits: Good looking output, similar to what we have now. Drawbacks: May have to disentangle from the rest of the mlmmj system.

Goals

• A system which is regularly improved, if possible, so we get bug fixes, interface improvements, etc. without having to do them ourselves.
• Ideally the formatting will be controllable by CSS so we can easily change fonts, colors, etc.
• If it every uses a proportional font, it needs to be very smart about switching to fixed mode where appropriate (ASCII art, etc.)
• Should be able to detect quoted text and indicate it (for example, gmail uses a purple font for such text)
• Thread/index view should indicate which message your mouse is hovering over. For example, see http://archives.free.net.ph/list/dundi.en.html.
• It is nice when individual messages show the thread map. Also nice is being able to have options for both next/prev message and next/prev by date. For example, see http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/procmail/2009-09/msg00038.html
• It is nice to be able to go to the next or previous period (month/quarter/year), as can be seen at the top of http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/procmail/2009-09/threads.html.
• We need to be able to generate Google Sitemap, plus RSS feeds with message excerpts (but right now we have separate scripts for doing that, which works)
• Must be able to detect URLs in message and linkify them
• Must offer (or we have to add) spam obfuscation of email addresses.
• Must be able to be enclosed within Insecure.Org chrome (the eye on the upper-left, menu bar, etc.)
• Must be able to set the default list view (e.g. threaded, reverse chronological, etc.)

Hypermail – http://www.hypermail.org/ (Google PR: 6)

(http://www.hypermail-project.org/ is slightly more recent.)

What we used now. No release since 2003. Formatting options are insufficient.

Thread view: http://www.hypermail.org/mail-archive/2003/Aug/
Sample message: http://www.hypermail.org/mail-archive/2003/Aug/0001.html
Seclists Thread view: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2009/q3/index.html
Seclists Individual mid-thread message: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2009/q3/0069.html

ezmlm-www – http://ezmlm-www.sourceforge.net/ (Google PR: 5)

Output looks nice. Seems to require an ezmlm installation. [This one doesn't impress me much. Doesn't seem to have a good way to view thread nesting or to indicate where we are in a thread in the individual messages. -Fyodor]

Thread view: http://listarchive.consultech.net/ZossPens/index.cgi?0:200604
Sample message: http://listarchive.consultech.net/ZossPens/index.cgi?0::8784

Gmane Loom – http://loom.gmane.org/ (Google PR: 6)

The web interface used by Gmane. Uses "non-standard, frightening and insecure features in web browsers to try to make it almost pleasant to read a newsgroup with a web browser." May have a dependency on the Weaver daemon. Already does RSS with excerpts. Not quite as easy to link to an individual message, though each page seems to have a permalink or "direct link" option for this purpose. Some of the keyboard shortcuts are really nice. The thread frame on top is a nice way to track where you are in the archive, but I'm not sure if it would work with the seclists chrome. Plus the extra frame can be a bit annoying.

Thread view: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.nmap.devel
Blog view: http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.nmap.devel
Sample message: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.nmap.devel/11807

Lurker – http://lurker.sourceforge.net/ (Google PR: 5)

Said to be highly scalable. Has an idiosyncratic thread view that I don't really like. Latest release was in March 2006.

Thread view: http://archives.free.net.ph/list/dundi.en.html
Sample message: http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20090829.175340.650ee1e6.en.html

MHonArc – http://mhonarc.org/ (Google PR: 7)

Sees use by other projects. Output looks nice and is presumably customizable. Last release in 2006 and no development since then. Has RSS output, without excerpts. Has the highest Pagerank if you exclide list.org, which is more about Mailman than pipermail specifically.

Thread view: http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/procmail/2009-09/threads.html
Sample message: http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/procmail/2009-09/msg00038.html

mlmmj – http://mlmmj.org (Google PR: 4)

A complete mailing list manager that includes an archiver. Output and URL formats is a lot like Hypermail. Lacks previous/next period links.

Thread view: http://mlmmj.org/archive/mlmmj/200907bydate.html
Sample message: http://mlmmj.org/archive/mlmmj/2009-07/1542.html

msgcab – http://msgcab.nongnu.org/ (Google PR: none)

Looks nice and lightweight, but doesn't look to be maintained and the demonstration site is down.

Pipermail – http://www.list.org/ (Google PR: 8)

Strangely enough, it's hard to find information on just Pipermail on the web. I think that it's built into Mailman. Output is plain. Similar to Hypermail.

Thread view: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-September/thread.html
Sample message: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-September/091513.html

More ideas

For excerpts we could use t-prot, which cuts out quoted text and long signatures. A howto is at http://freshmeat.net/articles/t-prot.

Gmail is a widely-liked interface for reading emails. We can look to that for some inspiration (e.g. for making look and feel decisions, as they've likely done research and used good designers).