I think I have just witnessed the death throes of list perishing from
it's own success. ETHICS-L has been generating so much mail in
the last few days that a number of active participants have felt
compelled to sign off for fear of endangering their jobs.  One
solution to this kind of high level activity is the ability to look
in on a list is the from time to time (interval user specifiable of
course).  The current LISTSERV structure doesn't appear to support
this kind of interface very well though.
 
The SPIRES-L list is currently being archived in a SPIRES data base
rather than (in addition to?) the usual CMS notebooks.  Several
people have already used this fact to set up their one jobs to
search the archive and retrieve messages on a daily or even weekly
basis.  In most cases they are also using a local facility for
automated job submission to initiate the remote search.  While it
may be possible to do the same sort of thing with Eric's data base
facility in LISTSERV, the mechanics are not obvious to me.  The
question also arises as to whether the database feature is generally
available on all LISTSERVs and whether they all are tresting their
archives as searchable databases.  To the extent that any of this
is possible I's sure like to see someone whip an end user document
with a title something like: Tracking a LISTSERV list in non-real
time.  The document should show how to restrict a search based on
date (and possibly time) as sell as significant keywords.
 
Any takers?
 
/June
 
To:  LSTSRV-L(LSTSRV-L@POLYGRAF)