Mailing lists are a way to provide manageable, transparent, E-Mail based communications to communities of people. Some of these communities are made up of tens of thousands of people, meaning that millions of conversations take place on these lists. Mailarky exists to archive these conversations and provide a useful and searchable forum-like interface to this mass of information.

The services offered on mailarky.com are and will always be free (well, unless the whole Mailarky team dies, the domain expires and then someone decided to purchase it and starts using the name for evil).

Why thanks for your interest! Simply target mailarky.com through Google Adsense. If you're not down with the Adsense, or have specific requirements, you can always contact us on help@mailarky.com and I'm sure we'll be able to work something out.

Should you need to contact an administrator for any reason, please send an E-Mail to help@mailarky.com . doing so will alert the entire mailarky team on their mobile devices. No matter how drunk we are, we'll endeavor to help you out as soon as we can because we're just awesome like that.

Well, it does and it doesn't. We can easily archive lists in any language covered by the unicode standard . that's no problem. However, the interface for the website is not localized; it's entirely English. I'm afraid we just don't have the resources to fix that right now. If you'd be interested in helping us translate the website to another language, we'd love to hear from you!

Privacy? We love it! We do keep some information though so it's only fair that we tell you what we do with it. We use our web server logs for analytics and troubleshooting in order to improve our service. We do allow users to contact people who have posted on mailing lists, but we never give away E-Mail addresses. This communication is done via a web form. If the recipient decides to reply to the message, only then will the sender be aware of the recipient's E-Mail address. We think this is a great tool for putting like-minded people together but we understand that not everyone will agree. If you've posted to mailing lists and you want to block Mailarky users from contacting you, feel free to sign up to Mailarky and modify your privacy settings to prevent this from happening.

Mailarky itself is not only a website but a system consisting of several pieces of software. This software is backed up immediately after any changes. This also stands true for configuration changes made to third party applications that support the Mailarky system. From a data perspective, all the important bits (like your favorite threads and people) are backed up and stored off-site daily. The whole database, however, is very large and so we chose to back this up once a month. We also store the raw emails that our friendly robot uses to create this archive. Again, these are constantly backed up to an off-site location. This provides extra assurance that if anything goes wrong, we can recover the data promptly. Not only that, but having the original data to hand allows us to easily implement new features and fix data that has been imported incorrectly.

Yes, we do! Currently, we support unlimited attachments in emails but there is a size limit of 2 megabytes. If you can give us a good reason why you think this value should be less restrictive, let us know! We're both extremely helpful and too lazy to argue.

All day, every day! We archive lists in near real-time. Normally, new E-Mails will appear on Mailarky within 15 minutes. We also update the site as and when needed to correct problems and add new features. If you come across any problems or think an extra feature would be useful, feel free to contact us on help@mailarky.com

We have several spam prevention measures. Some of these are designed to stop spam showing up in the archives, and others are designed to prevent Mailarky from providing potential spammers with E-Mail addresses. We have a lovely robot called Mailotron. When he receives incoming E-Mail one of the first things he does is look for tell-tale signs of spam. If it tastes like spam, he won't archive it. Sadly though, Mailotron doesn't get it right 100% of the time so we have a system in place where users can flag a message as spam. An administrator will promptly delete the email if it is confirmed to be spam. As a further measure, if enough people decide that a message is spam, the system will automagically hide the message without an admin having to do it for you. We ban known spammers so their future E-Mails will never show up on the site.

We hate spam and we'd hate to be a part of the problem so we never show E-Mail addresses on our website, not even in a obfuscated form . we block them completely. Better safe that sorry. If you need to contact a member of a list, you can do this by filling in a form. Our server will send them your message and make sure that when they reply, it goes to the address you used when you signed up to Mailarky.

Right now, 100%! We'll update this value as and when things explode...

We have no idea! However, we've engineered everything in such a way that means we'll be able to keep up with demand. If you find some particular function or area of the site is consistently slow, please let us know.

Just drop us an E-Mail at archive@mailarky.com
Simply provide us with the information we need to subscribe to your list and we'll make sure we get that set up for you ASAP.

Hmm, as a concept, sure! Yeah... we currently don't use RSS technology but you can expect that to change in the first quarter of 2010. You'll be able to create personalized feeds of your favorite threads or actions by your favorite people. Fancy, huh? Shame we're just too drunk to get it all done right now!