This is partially tangential, but: One of the best approaches to ensure the long-term preservation of these archives is to (1) keep them in an open, standard, widely-supported format -- "mbox" is clearly the best choice and (2) make them trivially easy to mirror. This has the desirable effect of allowing who wishes to maintain their own copy and/or to use the search engine of their choice on it. (In my case, I find "grepmail" to be highly useful for searching mail archives: it's better than anything else I've tried, and I've tried a lot of things.) It also allows folks to access the archives when disconnected from the 'net or when they're on a slow/expensive connection. The former is more than merely a matter of convenience: in some working environments: it's a requirement, e.g., in environments that are always physically disconnected from the 'net. So whatever presentation format is chosen, the original/raw mbox files should be available for download via -- at least -- https and rsync. Gzip'd tarballs of them should be regenerated nightly and also made available -- on a per-mailing-list basis and globally. (To make that clear: the latter means that it should be possible to download a single gzip'd tarball that contains all archives of all IETF mailing lists. Not only is that useful in its own right, but it'd be an excellent way to initialize a mirror that can be subsequently maintained via rsync.) A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the complete archives of all IETF mailing lists rendered as a gzip'd tarball would fit comfortably on a 32G USB stick. None of this is particularly hard to script and automate via cron: I've set up similar things many times. I'd be happy to do the work if nobody else can spare the time. ---rsk