A mailing list archive is a convenient, centralized way to store mailing list posts for easy retrieval. Publicly viewable Web archives provide transparency into a technical standards organization's activities and standards development processes, whereas archives of lists that exchange confidential information can be kept private. Access to a list's Web archives may be as open or as restricted as required.

Among their many virtues, archives allow users to follow subject threads, to catch up on email that may have been missed while on vacation and to familiarize themselves with list history.

There are two types of archives in the Kavi® Mailing List Manager system. The ezmlm software processes messages from mailing lists it manages into raw archives, then MHonArc software converts these raw archives into Web-viewable archives to provide more advanced indexing and search functionality.

In order for a mailing list to have any archives whatsoever, ezmlm archiving must be enabled (i.e., the -a switch must be set in the ezmlm-make argument string) in the list type on which the list is based. As long as archiving is enabled in the list type, raw archives will exist, even if they are not accessible to anyone except administrators.

The option to enable Web-visible archiving is available when a list is created or edited. If Web-visible archiving is completely disabled for a list, MHonArc archives will not be created. If the feature is enabled and then later disabled, any existing MHonArc archives for that list will be deleted—but as long as the raw archives still exist, Web archives can always be recreated. There is one caveat to this: any edits performed on the Web archives will be lost.

Since archiving does consume some system overhead, raw archiving can be disabled for lists where archives are unnecessary.

Access to raw archives is controlled through a list type option configured by super administrators when they add or edit one of the list types that serves as a template for mailing lists, whereas permissions for the web-viewable archives are set by admins when creating an individual list. This means that raw archives may be available to a different set of users than the HTML-formatted archives. Generally, access to raw archives is more restricted than access to web-viewable archives because they may contain content that isn't present in the web archives, such as the full email addresses of people who have posted to the list, which are usually obscured in the web archives.

Raw archives are accessed through ezmlm email address commands rather than Kavi Mailing List Manager tools, although there may be restrictions on who the list can accept commands from. For instance, the list type may be configured to accept email commands only from recognized subscribers and reject those from unknown senders. The most private list types may reject all email address commands except moderation commands. Administrators may always access the raw archives by URL path.

If web-visible archives exist, they will be accessible through Public, Member or Admin pages, or custom subscriber-only pages, depending on access control settings. Web-visible archives is determined by options set at the list level when the list is added or edited. Web archives can be temporarily hidden by editing the list and setting the Web Archive Visiblity option to 'Administrators only'.

For information on how mailing lists classify list users and control access, see Access Control.

For information on selecting appropriate user access settings for raw and Web archives, see Configuring Lists for Common Use Cases. For information on reconfiguring existing lists, see Changing List Type Options.

When raw archiving is enabled, messages that are posted to the list are also forwarded to a mailbox that collects messages to add to the archives. These messages are added to the archives in the order in which they are received.

Archive security is primarily based on the ability to restrict access to both the raw and web and archives, as we've already described, but it's also a good idea to take advantage of the 'Protect Archives from Spam' option when adding a list. When enabled, this feature "x's" out the domains of subscriber email addresses in the archives (e.g., fred@xxxxx.xxx) to protect subscriber addresses from address harvesting software. Spammers use this software, also known as spiders or scrapers, to search for and glean email addresses from every web page on the Internet. These addresses are compiled into address lists for the spammers personal use and for resale to other spammers.

The obscured email addresses are a little inconvenient when a list user wants to respond to another list user privately and isn't able to get the other's address from the Web archives. On the other hand, address harvesters are relentless in their attempts to crack or bypass system security, and the lists of address they gather may be sold to spammers around the world, including people running phishing schemes and other kinds of scams.