[Foundation-l] Email list archives

[Andrew Turvey]

I hope you don't mind my raising this issue here - it's a technical issue affecting all wikimedia email lists so I thought this would be as good a place as any. 

When I subscribe to an email list I tend to get emails delivered, but I sometimes find it useful to view older emails on the archive. I know some people like to read all their emails on the archive, so this is also important for them. It is also useful when you have to make a publicly accessible reference to a previous post. 

However, the standard interface and formatting in the archives is not particularly professional or up to date. For instance, looking at a recent message I posted to the WikimediaUK list: 

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediauk-l/2009-August/004565.html 

The word wrapping is all over the shop and the formatting has all been stripped from the text. Some third party re-users do a better job, but it's still not all the way there: 

The Mail Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg01470.html 
Google Mail: http://groups.google.com/group/wmf-wikimediauk-l/browse_thread/thread/a350852f8ad2ef63 

The line spacing looks funny with the first and you still lose the text formatting with the second. 

Has anyone got any tips about how I can either format an email to begin with or view the email afterwards to solve this problem? 

Secondly, has this technology been developed recently? Seems it needs a bit of investment, or alternatively, we need to move over to a better third party platform like, perhaps, Yahoo Groups. 

Regards, 

Andrew