3 ms·

I find plain mailing lists to be less search-friendly. They're fine if you're an active participant but IMO need to be complemented with a proper web facade for

• minusf 5y ago
  really depends on the mailing list software. unfortunately there is basically google grouops and/or mailman2/mailman3. for self hosting there isn't even a choice at all: mailing lists suffer even more from what forums suffer as well: little software choice that ticks all the boxes for different people with different needs. however the real (search) power of the mailing lists is of course that you have the mails locally for the lists where you are subscribed to... i remember forum searches becoming so heavy, site wide search forms had to be hidden behind sign up walls... and it was mostly poor keywords search, forget about full text. with local emails at least i get a shot at organizing and searching for it. try saving a local copy of a forum thread...
• layer8 5y ago
  The traditional way as a mailing list subscriber is to automatically filter incoming messages of each mailing list into a dedicated folder, which builds you an archive from when you first joined. In addition, mailing list servers (at least used to) provide zip archives of messages by month/year in mbox format that you can import into your local folder. When that wasn’t available, I sometimes asked long-time subscribers for a copy of their archive. The benefit is that you are not dependent on whatever search tooling the list server provides, but can use the email client of your choice, and you still have the archive in case the list server shuts down.