Several subscribers have asked me how to Search the Archives for messages with specific content. Below is what I copied from the RootsWeb web site. PLEASE, read all of it before you attempt to do it yourself. Keep in mind that this message was directed to us Listowners; however, the same procedures apply to you as a subscriber. Just follow the instructions EXACTLY AS GIVEN. PLEASE, note that all the instructions are sent to the address with the "-request". If you leave out that element, your mail will just come to the List and nothing will happen To make it absolutely clear, here is an example: Send your request to: [email protected] NOT to: [email protected] (Replace WHATEVER with the name of the List you are searching.) Your Listowner, SgtGeorge ========================== Search Features for a RootsWeb Mailing List From a message posted on 8 April to the RootsWeb listowners mailing list... Searching your archives: It can be done. We've not made a lot of noise about it before because the implications for the lists with large archives, such as ROOTS-L, are a bit scary: the "search engine" that SmartList uses is the Unix grep command. So if your list has had more than 3000 messages posted, we'd rather your users did not use the SmartList search feature. But if your list has had that many messages, let us know and we'll get a WWW search up as soon as we can. See: http://searches.rootsweb.com/roots-l.search.html to see what we did for ROOTS-L and its archive of nearly 200,000 messages.) And time allowing, we'll put up WWW searches of all the public lists, no matter whether they've had 3000 messages or not. Meanwhile, most of our lists here at RootsWeb have had substantially fewer than 3000 messages posted to them. So, how do you search the archives of your list? I'm a great believer in examples. Here's the sequence for KEITHLEY-L, a non-digested mailing list. (Margaret, GEN-MARKET, being a digest, will work a bit differently. I'll try to point out the differences as I go...) Search requests are sent to the -request for the mailing list. The subject line should say archive. If I wanted to search for the name Rowland, the command I'd use would be: search Rowland latest/* Put all together, it would look like this: To: [email protected] Subject: archive -------- search Rowland latest/* The search Rowland part is probably clear. What's that latest/* on the end? Your archived messages (up to 8000 of them) are stored in an area associated with your mailing list called latest. The * is a wildcard -- it says to search all the messages for Rowland. If you had said instead search Rowland latest/1* then the search would be confined to messages whose numbers start with 1 (such as 10, 15, 111, 1254, etc.) I don't think you can specify a range -- if you wrote 23-27 it wouldn't search messages 23 through 27, it would look for a message numbered 23-27, not find it, and give up. That is, this search is kind of simple minded. But that makes it easier to use? (If the list is instead a digested list, the command instead would be: search Rowland volume97/* to search all the digests in volume97, which is where the 1997 digests are stored.) What do you get back? Something like this: From: [email protected] Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 10:07:01 -0700 Message-Id: <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: archive retrieval: search Rowland latest/* search Rowland latest/* BEGIN---------------cut here------------------ latest/12:24: Rowland family and the German Baptist Brethren church latest/16:23: My Great-grandfather, Baptist Rev. Homer Rowland of the Flatonia, Texas latest/16:24: area, was the son of Judge Robert A. Rowland and Olive Ann (Keithley) latest/16:25: Rowland of Howard County, Missouri. (Married 7 April 1846, probably in Boone latest/46:26: Thomas Rowland, Hary Grigsby and A. Grigsby, attended his funeral. After latest/47:22: His brothers and his nephews, Thomas Rowland, Harry Grigsby and A. latest/47:25: Note on this sentence: Thomas Rowland was a son of Olive Keithley Rowland, latest/47:26: wife of Robert A. Rowland. Harry and A. Grigsby were sons of Sarah Keithley What do you do with that? Well, first, note that odd "Reply-to:" line. It's bound to alarm some of your subscribers, but is actually innocuous. It's either to prevent mail loops or perhaps to make sure that the subject line, when they order the messages, isn't "Subject: Re: archive retrieval." (SmartList doesn't process messages with subject lines like that, it sends 'em straight to you.) The rest of the report is a listing of lines in which it found Rowland. (I think if you want ROWLAND you should ask for ROWLAND, though those of you who know grep might try something like search -i Rowland latest/* to see what happens). Consider this line: latest/47:26: wife of Robert A. Rowland. Harry and A. Grigsby were sons of Sarah Keithley The first bit, before the first colon, is latest/47. That says that this line is from message 47. The next bit, between the two colons, is 26 -- the line shown is the 26th line of that messages. And the rest of it is the line from the message itself. If you want to see the whole message, you can. You again write to the list's -request address, using a subject line that says: archive The command is: get latest/47 to get the 47th message (or get volume97/23 to get the 23rd digest from 1997.) SmartList is very finicky about case: get Latest/47 Will not work. Extra spaces confuse it, too -- note that there are no spaces in latest/47. Put together, the message looks something like this: To: [email protected] Subject: archive -------- get latest/47 What do I get back? See below... From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: archive retrieval: latest/47 >From [email protected] Wed Mar 26 11:21:08 1997 Received: from bl-4.rootsweb.com ([email protected] [204.212.38.29]) by bl-12.rootsweb.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA09218 for ; Wed, 26 Mar 1997 11:21:08 -0800 Received: from mailrvao1.er.usgs.GOV (mailrvao1.er.usgs.gov [130.11.62.8]) by bl-4.rootsweb.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id LAA23614 for ; Wed, 26 Mar 1997 11:24:47 -0800 Received: from cnethaway.usgs.gov ([130.11.63.31]) by mailrvao1.er.usgs.GOV (EMAIL 1.2.1) with SMTP id OAA07353 for ; Wed, 26 Mar 1997 14:23:47 -0500 Message-Id: <[email protected]> X-Sender: [email protected] X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.4 (32) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 14:24:40 -0500 To: [email protected] From: Charles Nethaway Subject: Joseph H. Keithley b 1823 -- cont. From the Booneville Weekly Advertiser, 16 May 1890 (Missouri) Obituary: Joseph H. Keithley, 1823-1890, Howard County, Missouri Joseph H. Keithley was born November 11, 1823, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, and died in Booneville, Missouri, May 12, 1890. ... His brothers and his nephews, Thomas Rowland, Harry Grigsby and A. Grigsby, attended his funeral. ... Note on this sentence: Thomas Rowland was a son of Olive Keithley Rowland, wife of Robert A. Rowland. Harry and A. Grigsby were sons of Sarah Keithley Grigsby, wife of A.H. Grigsby of Fayette, Howard, Missouri. Olive and Sarah were sisters of Joseph.