For everyone else, the thing you have to realize is that the IETF does not use the Mailman archiving system. Thus, while you can set the Mailman archiving option on the administrative pages, which will result in Mailman keeping some archives, these archives are not the official archives of the IETF. Setting the option is simply a duplication of effort.
What some folks are seeing is that when you set the Mailman option for a private archive, Mailman adds an "informative" message to the listinfo page saying there's a private archive. While it's true that Mailman is keeping this private archive, it serves no useful purpose except to double disk usage.
IETF mailing list archives are all found here: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/text/LISTNAME http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/LISTNAMENote that this independent archive system has existed at the IETF for a very long time, way before Mailman was installed. The "issue" is that when Mailman was installed nobody bothered to try and integrate the existing archive system into Mailman.
I believe I understand how to do this now. I have a little bit more testing to do but, if successful, we can make this apparent confusion go away. If it works, the Mailman options will work as expected and Mailman will use the external system.
In the meantime, please take note of where your archives are supposed to be and feel free to double check that those archives are correct.
The problem with rai-discuss is that the list does not have the archives subscribed to it. You see, the way this external system was "added" to Mailman was to create two special email addresses for each mailing list, one for each type of archive. These addresses are then subscribed to the mailing list. As long as they remain as subscribers then everything works.
It seems that for rai-discuss these special subscribers do not exist and are not subscribers to the list. Thus, the archive is empty.
If anybody has back messages and can make those available to me I will add them to the archive so it is complete.
Other than that, I've asked to have the special aliases created and I'll get them subscribed to the list so that all future messages are archived.
I'm sorry Cullen but I have no explanation for why these archive aliases were neither created nor added to the list of subscribers.
Jim-- On Monday, May 12, 2008 2:54 PM -0700 Cullen Jennings <fluffy at cisco.com> wrote regarding mailing list archives --
Something weird seems to be going on with the archives and I don't have enough data points to figure out if it is just stuff that was set up wrong in the past or if something changes. Can folks look at your lists that are at ietf.org and see if 1) did public archives somehow get turned into private achieves ? This might have happened for at least one I know of 2) do the archives still exist for the list Thanks, Cullen Begin forwarded message: > From: "Dan Wing" <dwing at cisco.com> > Date: May 12, 2008 2:02:08 PM PDT > To: <mankin at psg.com>, "'Jon Peterson'" > <jon.peterson at neustar.biz>, "'Cullen Jennings \(fluffy\)'" > <fluffy at cisco.com> > Subject: rai-discuss archives > > RAI-Discuss list owners: > > At https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rai-discuss, it says: > > To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the > Rai- discuss > Archives. (The current archive is only available to the list > members.) > > Although I am a member of rai-discuss (and logged into mailman) > I cannot view > the archives -- when I go to > http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rai-discuss/current/index. > html I only see > the attached. > > What's up with rai-discuss archives? > > -d