Fwd: MarkMail: hosting Apache mailing list archives

[Greg Reddin <gr...@gmail.com>]

See the following email from Jason Hunter.

Thanks,
Greg


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jason Hunter <jh...@acm.org>
Date: Nov 4, 2007 9:56 PM
Subject: MarkMail: hosting Apache mailing list archives
To: pmcs@apache.org

For the last few months I've been working on a new project: a web
site for interacting with email archives.  We're using, as the
site's initial content set, the public Apache mailing list archives
-- because Apache is the community I know best and I think people
here will find the site useful.  We've loaded a bit over 4,000,000
emails across 500 lists.

http://apache.markmail.org

As you'll see with the chart on the home page, one of our goals with
the site has been to focus heavily on analytics.  We have lots of
graphs and counts, and you're able to use them to watch Apache's
historical growth and each individual project's growth.  Every query
you write gets its own histogram chart.

Another goal has been interactivity.  Every search result screen gives
you lots of ways to refine your search (by sender, list, attachment
type, etc).  Plus we did a lot with keyboard shortcuts.  You can hit
"n" and "p" to move to the next and previous result and "j" and "k" to
move up and down the thread view.  There's a lot of little things like
this.  Plus if your result message includes Office or PDF files
they're in-line interactive too.

http://apache.markmail.org/search/ext:ppt+axis

Another goal has been to focus on community.  We could have launched
MarkMail with 50,000,000 emails from many sources but I think it's
better to start with focus.  In fact, I'll be at ApacheCon and the
Hackathon next week, along with my co-developer Ryan Grimm,
looking for people's suggestions and maybe on the spot adding in a
few of them.  There's also potential to explore some fun one-off
analytics, too.

As part of the focus on communities, we setup MarkMail so it
recognizes that Apache itself consists of many communities.  If you go
to http://apache.markmail.org you search all Apache emails, but if you
go to http://struts.markmail.org then you're auto-limited to just
Struts lists.  Same for tomcat, spamassassin, httpd, and so on.  You
can always limit your search using "list:struts" in your query, but
using the domain handles that a bit more elegantly.

I've been working on this a long time, and I'm so happy to be able to
share it with everyone.  I hope you all find this useful!

Notes on using the site:

* Search using keywords as well as from:, subject:, extension:, and
   list: constraints

* The GUI doesn't yet expose it, but you can negate any search item,
   like -subject:jira.

* You can sort results by date by adding order:date-forward or
   order:date-backward to your query

* Remember to use "n" and "p" keyboard shortcuts to navigate the search
   results

* You're going to want JavaScript enabled

If you'd like to send me private feedback I'm jhunter at apache dot org.

-jh-