I replied directly to the original request for information about this, but
it seems to be of some general interest, so here goes to the list.
 
When I was working at University College Dublin, I set up a public minidisk
on which LISTSERV would archive the postings to a number of locally
popular lists.  This makes it possible for users to LINK and ACCESS the
archive (BBOARD) minidisk, and to use Rice MAIL to browse the notebooks
of interest.
 
In order to make this more user-friendly, I put together a BBOARD EXEC
to do the LINK and ACCESS, and which would also give a nice display of
what Bulletin Boards were available, which had changed since the last
time the user had looked, and so on.
 
I also had to make some small changes in the MAILSYS XEDIT macro.
 
Once this was in place, users were actively discouraged from subscribing
privately, and it was pointed out to them that they would economize not
only on shared spool space, but also on private disk space by using
BBOARD instead.
 
My colleagues at UCD have recently announced that mail which is available
using the BBOARD mechanism will be purged from users' readers after three days.
 
BBOARD still has one or two irritating features which should be eliminated.
If there is enough interest, I could have it put up on some server --
as is, of course.  It would be interesting to have feedback from a wider
customer base.
 
Niall O'Reilly
EARN OSI Network Operations Centre
Amsterdam