Kathleen Swick, Swick_Kathleen at asdk12.org wrote:
"I have been silently lurking on the AlpineL list for a lot years,
enjoying the postings very much, esp in the days when there were monthly
topics. What finally causes me to post is my frustration finding and
searching the AlpineL archives. I vaguely remember a lot of chat being
exchanged on this topic, but I wasn’t paying attention since I didn’t
need to.
As for the archives, the most recent list seems to be only searchable
month by month, incredibly cumbersome and ineffective. When I try to
find the old archives that had a search engine, I get a notice about the
server being unfindable. What am I missing here?"
Kathleen Swick
Anchorage, Ak
Zone 3/4 variable
==================
Hello Kathleen,
Your inquiry is timely. I'm happy to summarize the Alpine-L activity
that occurred near the end of 2010 and early 2011 regarding changes in
the AlpineL List.
Near the end of 2010, the fate of Alpine-L was uncertain, as the hosting
entity for Alpine-L was discontinuing, and Alpine-L had to find a new
server hosting location or be ended. Eric Gouda found a new location,
so Alpine-L was moved to a new server in the Netherlands and Alpine-L
survived from being decommissioned. Per a long standing plea for
someone to manage the listserv, I volunteered.
In Alpine-L's new home, it unfortunately does not have built-in
"searchable archive" capabilities. Mail-list or "List-serv" technology
originated in the early 1980s, ait's old, and much of the file format
and archiving of messages is unfortunately proprietary; formats licensed
and belonging to this or that organization, but no universal standard
format, no standardized access to data that we enjoy in today's current
technology. So, Alpine-L finally found a new home, but years of
messages became non-serachable in that new home.
With the advent of a new hosting location, I subscribed Alpine-L to
something called "The Mail Archive", you can visit it by going to:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/index.html
...this link is always listed as part of my signature block. It has a
good search function.
This well-done interface allows fast searching on keywords, but will
only search archives starting from when we first signed up with the
service, near the beginning of January 2011. Searching on the word
"bog" gives 10 results. It is not searching only month by month, but
searches the entire "The Mail Archive" history of Alpine-L (which at
this point in July 2011 is +7 months of history).
What about the years of previous Alpine-L messages. Eric Gouda
painstakingly copied all of the past archived messages to the new
hosting server, unfortunately under the new hosting service, it does not
automatically index and search legacy email archives using a
non-standard proprietary format. I attempted to subscribe to a
recommended service that indexes older archives (called MarkMail; no
relation to me :-), and they accepted the request to index the backlog
of old archive emails, but even after repeated email inquiries, they
have not converted the archives to searchable "Markmail" standard
format, and haven't answered the last email inquiries. So, at present,
the decade or so of old Alpine-L archived email messages remains
unsearchable, primarily because of their specialized proprietary file
archive format used by the original Alpine-L. In today's technological
world, of blogs and forums, the info is totally out there and
universally accessible and searchable with Google, unfortunately not the
case with older legacy formats and protective "proprietary" formats used
in early Alpine-L days.
I will continue to try with Markmail, or perhaps another 3rd-party
service, to get the legacy Alpine-L archives indexed and searchable in a
current-day format. Thus far the prospects have met dead ends.
Regards,
Mark McDonough
Alpine-L list-owner
[email protected]
Massachusetts, USA
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