Mailing List Archive Project

What the heck is this thing ?

A few months ago - I was looking for decent solution to do mailing list archiving with. All the solutions that I found had either a crappy user interface, limited search capabilities, inefficent storage, or all three.

So, this project was born. It's pretty simple, all it does is archive email in a SQL database with a nice PHP front end, and full text search capabilities.

Here's a screenshot of the current version. 180k jpeg

How to get it

You can get source from the project Download page,

via Anonymous FTP

or By anonymous CVS. The development/ tree contains the latest.

You'll also need php version 3 or 4, perl 5.x, postgres, and phplib.

Here's an Installation document

Status

Get the latest news from the project News page

Here's the latest Release

Here's what we've got left for a 1.0 release.

We also need (lots!) of work done on this web page

Wanna help ? Send me some mail !

Goals

• Demonstrate web development and web server technologies on linux
• Create a searchable nice looking mailing list archive for Open Source Mailing list
• Have no practical limit on age or amount of mail archived
• Be able to search mail archive with a reasonable response time

Specifications

Are found here

Test Plan

Is found here

Design

Is found here

Source code:

• application.inc - shared application constants and definitions
• archive_display.php - display the body of a mail message
• archive_frame.php - frame set and initial page
• archive_list.php - List of messages
• archive_nav.php - Search criteria and preference settings
• class_mail.inc - Mail header, list, and text objects for php
• database.inc - Database interface stuff for php
• save_message.pl - Perl script invoked to save each message

Old status stuff

• Database created
• Perl script to save messages created
• All prior messages stored in database archive
• open-source-archive mail alias setup on host, and subscribed to list. All mail traffic now archived.
• Archived mail in a nicely displayed format via frames
• Basic searching and date range limiting implemented
• Default date range implemented
• Announced to mailing list and made publicly available
• Development version moved to it's own directory
• Using RCS for source code control
• Did rest of work to impliment seperate production and development versions. Have two databases - mail_archive_development and mail_archive_production
• the initial list of messages is date limited to the last N days
• Fixed message search to take multiple date formats
• Changed message search criteria radio button to a text selector to save room.
• Message header display setting
• Changing mail archive script to create MD5 across headers instead of entire message
• Since 1 database will handle multiple mailing lists instead of 1 database per list, rename the database to something more sane.
• A link to the perl source code is in this document
• Fix color scheme on archive display
• Test plan created
• Make database definition consistant
• Fix php database source code to be non-postgres specific
• Extend db to handle multiple lists
• Extend mail archive script to handle multiple lists
• Extend message search and message list display to handle multiple lists
• Objectified the database interface in development
• Objectified mail messages in development
• Updated most of source code for new object interface in development
• Determine what user prefs to save, and create a mechanism for saving them.
• Fix message searches to be non-case sensitive