[TriLUG] searchable mail archive

[Alan Porter]

At $WORK, we have a handful of mailman lists that we rely on ENTIRELY 
TOO MUCH.

Where some would:
- use a wiki to work together
- open a bug report to track a problem
- post their in/out status to a board
- hold a conversation on a forum
- mention in passing that they are hungry
- chuckle quietly to himself

...in each case, we just blast a message out to the entire mailing list.

Most of our users are running Outlook, and most users do what they are 
told to do -- they keep their backlog of mail on the Exchange server.  
So even a simple search is very slow.  (Some more enlightened users run 
"better" mail clients and keep their $MAILDIRs close at hand... those 
people tend not to have these search problems... but that's a much 
larger cultural fight).

So now we're looking for a tool to allow us to quickly search our 
mailing list history.

Our group does not have direct access to the mail server, but we're 
thinking it might make sense to have a dummy user that subscribes to the 
mailing lists, stores the mail archives locally, and runs a web server 
and a web-based search tool that can do the searches and return results.

Do any of you guys have suggestions for such a mail archive searcher server?

Or -- without pointing out that "we're doing it wrong" -- is there a 
tweak we can make to our process that might make this task a little easier?

-- 
# Alan Porter