Hi all, February marks the 6th birthday of Mail-Archive. This is a pretty big birthday for an internet service - not too many make it this far. As some of you remember, the service started as a tiny experimental hobby project. Six years ago, Mail-Archive was running off a residential cable modem on a computer that was literally duct taped together. We've come a long way; I am typing these words from a major collocation facility as Mail-Archive undergoes its latest hardware upgrade.
Speaking of which, this weekend Mail-Archive is in the process of upgrading the primary server and transferring to a new network. Because of the large amount of data involved, incoming mail is being queued for the duration of the upgrade. Hopefully there will be minimal additional hiccups (there was a some downtime yesterday). No mail has been or will be lost, and the service should be generally up during the rest of the upgrade. Things should be completely rolling again some time Monday. There's other big news as well. After much thought, discussion, experiments, and encouragement, I've finally decided to try commercialization. Specifically, Mail-Archive is going to start using advertisements when the upgrade is completed. Depending on the vagaries of the internet's domain name resolution service, some users may see them sooner than others. Some of the inspiration comes from companies like Google, who appear to have found a healthy balance between offering a clean and useful service, and a business model (non-obnoxious advertisements) that does not significantly compromise the user experience. It is my hope and expectation that Mail-Archive will be able to become self sustaining, and perhaps even have the resources for quality improvements. The plan is to do all that while following a Google-esque "don't be evil" mindset. I'm sure more detail will come up here or in the FAQ as things unfold, in the meantime thank you for your patience and understanding. It has been six wonderful and entertaining years so far; Mail-Archive has made a big positive impact on my personal fun-o-meter, and hopefully positively influenced many others, even if in only a very very small way. As always, feedback and comments are highly appreciated. Cheers, Jeff _______________________________________________ Gossip mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
