I'm getting ready to do a project that involves setting up Mailman lists and archives and a simplified web interface and whatnot. Seems like basic stuff, though we've investigated it enough so far not to expect it to be basic. But I've looked through Mailman source in the past, and it's not that hard to grok.

But what's really starting to make me wonder is the archiving -- I can't find any good archivers. Everyone seems to agree that Pipermail is obsolete. MHonarc is still alive, though it doesn't seem to be lively, and Hypermail is... I don't know what Hypermail is. Looks just like Pipermail to me. They all produce rather boring static HTML pages, without a whole lot of added value. And what's up with MailBoxer? I'm a little nervous about an all-in-one package (and Zope, and DTML).

I must be missing something. Don't people want nice mail archives? I know this isn't rocket science, so why hasn't someone done something cool? I'm starting to feel like I should just code something myself -- the email module does the work I'd be scared to do (parsing real-world email messages), and I could use dbmail (if I fully trusted a big database archive, which I'm unsure of). For search I'm still uncertain, but I think PyLucene is probably easier to build and use than the first time I tried it, and everyone seems to like its results.

Maybe I should look at this as an "opportunity". But dear lazyweb, I am very willing to ride on other people's coat tails, just tell me whose...