How to Use Mailing Lists:
Mailing List Archives - The Index and Get Commands

At Cornell, most of the lists are not archived, so most people will not need this information.

Lists created for work, courses, or research purposes are eligible to use ListProc's archiving system. This service supports the automatic archival of mail to the list, along with some facilities for storing independent files that might be useful to list subscribers. Note that many list owners may choose to disable archiving for their lists, so even if the list is work- or research-related, archives may not be available.

If a list's messages are archived, they can be retrieved with the get command. You may need to know a special password to access the archives; ask your list owner (see Getting Help for more information on contacting your list owner.)

Note that in the examples below, the names of the archive files and the passwords used to access them are case-sensitive. In order for ListProc to recognize the archive name and access password you must type them exactly.

Index Command

When you subscribe to a list, you will receive information about its archives, if any. To see an entire list of files stored for a list, use the index command as shown in this example:

If the archives are protected by a password, use the following example:

index history234-L /archivepassword

Note the slash character, "/," is required. The password is case-sensitive.

If a list has no archives, ListProc sends a message saying "not a valid archive or path" in response to the command above. If archives exist but access to them is restricted, you will receive a message indicating this. Otherwise you will receive a list of the files that can be retrieved with the get command.

Get Command

Each of the files listed by the index command will have a unique name. Many of the filenames will appear as dates since the list's mail will be archived by date. For example, you may need to retrieve the archive for a whole week to find the messages for one particular day.

To access the archives, use the get command, and follow it with the name of the list and the name of the file, as in this example to get the sailing list's archive file for 09/95 (part c):

Note that the archive name itself must be in all lowercase letters and that the character preceding the "9509" is a lowercase "L" and not the number one (1). This is one of the few places that it matters whether you use upper- or lowercase.

If the archives are protected by a password (ask the list owner for it), use the following example to get the same file:

get history234-L history234-l9509c /archivepassword

Note the slash character, "/," is required. The password is case-sensitive.

ListProc updates archives periodically. Other files, such as a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) and their answers, may be added by list owners as the need arises.