There is a shareware program called hypermail. Hypermail is a shareware
program. It works by converting an email message into a www page. It
then builds and maintains an archive of pages, sorted by subject heading,
thread, date and author. It is capable of doing this completely
automatically.
With the archive set up through hypermail, you could get it to look at
all the gum bichromate messages, all the carbon transfer message, all of
Judy Siegal's message etc. etc.
It is also possible to use a www search engine to search each of the
individual pages.
The great advantage of a hypermail archive is that it would always be up
to date. The archive could easily be updated daily.
All the offers to convert the archives to books and indexes are
wonderful, but this list is very active. A book would or index would be
quickly outdated due to the sheer volume of information this list carries.
The reason I am not able to do this now, is because of the size of the
archive. I simnply do not have enough room on my personal account to
accomadote the entire archive. I am trying to see if I can get some
space made for the archive at the University here, independent of my own
space. This a tricky endevour, so it will take some time.
I am not the only one that is capable of doing this however, Hypermail is
a shareware product, and works independently from the listprocessor that
runs the list. If anyone else on the list has access to vast amounts of
computer storage areas (all you college profs???) You may be able to set the
archive vai hypermail at your own site, provided your are running a unix
system and have a webserver program running.
ANY VOLUNTEERS? you would provide a highly needed service to all. PLEASE
contact me directly if you are interested.
I know that the www is not accessable to everyone, though I beleive that
anyone who can do email has the capability to run the world wide web
browser program "Lynx", its not nearly as flashy and fancy as Netscape or
Mosaic, but it works. It was written as a strictly text based www
program. If you are using a text-only computer I urge you to see if your
system supports lynx. I beleive it was one of the first if not the first
www browser created.
If you are under the impression that you must have a Windows or Mac
computer running Netscape to access the world wide web, you are incorrect.
If so please look into Lynx.
Once the www archive is established there may be a way of making a email
gateway to it.
________________________________________________________________________
Gordon J. Holtslander 112 Science Place
HOLTSLANDER@SKYFOX.USASK.CA Department of Biology
URL: /~holtsg University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Tel (306)966-4433 S7N 5E2
Fax (306)966-4461 Canada
________________________________________________________________________
On Fri, 26 Jul 1996 FotoDave@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 96-07-25 08:30:33 EDT, you write:
>
> << Is there not a possibility to let us help Steve in order to make the
> searching
> easier , apart from WEB pages (not everybody can access these) or the
> creation
> of an Alt-Proc book. >>
>
> Good idea! I would volunteer for gum printing and/or Carbon printing.
> Actually, since I am also a computer engineer, I could actually write a
> program that automatically sorts out all the archives by the subjects. It
> will take some time though before it is written and tested. Of course we all
> know that sometimes the discussion strays away from the subject, but at least
> using the subject line is one easy way to systematize the sorting.
>