Mailing List Archive Tools

Electronic mailing lists are a common forum for discussion on the Internet. Each participant receives a copy of each message posted to the list with an additional copy typically archived at a well-known site for later retrieval. Busy lists and long-running lists can quickly accumulate many messages making it difficult to locate information. Few sites provide mechanisms for the efficient storage or retrieval of information from these archives. The Mailing List Archive (MLA) tools were designed to address these issues.

Mail messages are stored in a space-efficient manner and the archive information is processed to create a database that is optimized for fast queries. The MLA tools are designed for use as Computer Gateway Interface (CGI) applications so that archives can be accessed through HTML forms on the World Wide Web. Concurrent update and retrieval are an integral part of the design so that up to date information is always returned in query results.