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

As of 14 July 2006, the service boasted inclusion of 35,547,805 (over 35 million) messages in its archive, and was subscribed to 4,108 active lists.

The number of messages in The Mail Archive ballooned almost sevenfold in the four years prior to the above reading of this figure. According to archive.org, The Mail Archive held 5,226,371 messages from 2,697 lists on 29 May 2002.

External links

• The Mail Archive
• Jeff Breidenbach
• Jeff Marshall
• The Internet Wayback Machine's first index of The Mail Archive

Mailing lists