I think this depends on the nature of the list: the ones I run 
are sort of scholarly (focused on discussions of teaching, 
mostly) and I often find it useful to tell people that 
something's been discussed and there's useful information back a 
few mnonths, or years.  But I sure see the argument for its 
being more like conversation, which isn't archived and shouldn't 
be . . .

-- Russ

> I've never liked archives.  I had the experience of new
> people coming onto my forum, browsing the archives, becoming
> incensed at some previous article or other that had mentioned
> them and demanding that I remove said offending articles. 
> (Mine are a contentious lot.)  My solution was to drop
> archives entirely. 
St. Thomas University
http://www.StThomasU.ca/~hunt/