One reason: google offers no way to download content generated by your group. Downloading the archive of mailing lists was a common technique not so long ago to

One reason: google offers no way to download content generated by your group. Downloading the archive of mailing lists was a common technique not so long ago to update yourself quickly with a locally searchable archive. Not possible with google groups. This is a very annoying limitation and it makes my research and communication work more complicated every day. Using google groups forces people to send their very own content into a silo with no way to get it out again without using the google gui. Another reason: the google groups gui is simply very bad and not usable for professional researchers, I do not want to go into details on this, as it may be based on personal perception, but I always wonder how this product could ever be released to the public, but people seem to accept everything nowadays. One may not need to use the horrible gui when receiving all the messages via a mailserver, but then you still have no way to research things from the past (see above). Also many people maybe would like to avoid using google at all. It would be great if you offered at least a mirror with a downloadable archive. Thanks!