Hi Earl,
An RDF rcfile would be totally cool, and also show off the flexibility of MHonArc. I think it also might be a candidate for the MHonArc examples directory. I briefly started making one, and it seemed tricky. Any alternate to the list-of-lists would be great, because the current one is getting so unwieldy, even for personal use. I don't know what the best solution is, though. Htdig can merge multiple htdig-dbs. However, I don't think I have the hardware to search across millions of message. So if I did go with the 'interest finder' suggestion, it would probably just have a small, independent htdig-database that covered only recent messages from all the lists. It's hard for me to make subjective calls on index layouts, as I recognize I'm no expert, but have mild (not unwavering!) trust in my intuition. In the threads case, I chose lots of repetition of subject lines, to make it trivial to tell at a glance what the major threads are about. I'm afraid of the complexity that might come with keeping metadata like descriptions and subscription information around. Baggage might include logins, a concept of list archive administrators, and probably a few other things. The best ideas I have for metadata is 1) Hope the yahoo's and liszt's of the world decide to do it. This is what I am really hoping for. 2) Somehow link against the list's intro letter that is sometimes sent directly to archive@jab.org 3) Make it possible for people to forward metadata as an email to a special address. Thus the metadata would be made accessable in the format of a list archive. Jeff