(1) Well, I went to look at the secretariate archive for TRADE and,
besides the real mail, it has lots of spam which isn't in the real WG
archive. It would appear that the archive addresses are on spammers
lists. This greatly reduces the utility of the archives in my mind. Seems
to me the headers could be checked and almost all mail directly to the
archives tossed. (Ideally the archives would have only the mail really
send out on the mailing list, but that would probably requires the
exploders to sign outgoing mail which is another whole discussion.)
(2) Having the right secretariate archive address on a WG mailing list
always struck me as something whose checking would be pretty easy to
automate. You just send an automated test message near the beginning of
each month to every WG mailing list. About a week later, you check if
they all made it into the archive files (just check for some unique
string in the body of the test mail like a hash of the date sent and WG
name). If you don't find it in the archive for some WG, you send off a
ping to the WG chairs/ADs/whoever...