I think  one must not  lose sight of the  fact that, even  on mainframes,
disk space is inexpensive. I've received a few price lists for the L-Soft
off-the-shelf business and  it seems the market price  for "second class"
disk  space  (meaning   units  not  running  off   the  latest  whiz-bang
non-volatile  write-through asynchronous  migration cache  controller and
with a  slightly lower  transfer rate, which  are perfectly  adequate for
storing list archives) is on the order  of a few dollars per megabyte per
month.  Most of  these price  lists are  for "external"  use with  a very
definite profit. The price for on-campus use, which generally corresponds
to actual costs with a small  margin, is more like $1/meg/month. Well, it
takes a  lot of  notebook editing  before you save  a megabyte,  and then
you've just saved  $12 a year. So  unless you have a high  volume list or
people post long messages, it's just not worth your time.
 
  Eric