Hi everyone,

This gets weirder and weirder...

On Oct. 5, I wrote this to the csound mailing list:
>I would like to propose adding an archive of this list to
>http://www.egroups.com/ 
>... Unless the group decides otherwise, I
>volunteer to make this happen.

I heard directly from one or two people (one was Hans, I think) saying
"Good idea, go ahead."  Nobody said it was a bad idea. So I figured I
should just do it.

Well, I went back to egroups and started reading their documentation
about the process of creating a group, archiving an existing mailing
list, etc. I tried to create a new group called Csound to archive our
mailing list in, and got an error: "A group is already using that name."
Where'd that come from? Sure enough, there it is:
http://www.eGroups.com/list/csound

Somehow I guess I must have overlooked this group when I first stumbled
on egroups.com. You'd think the search I did for any message containing
"csound" would have turned it up! Anyway, at this point I didn't care, I
was just happy that there's an archive of the list accessible
and--wonder of wonders--searchable!

But now things are REALLY strange. When I tried to view some of the
5.000+ messages archived there, I kept getting "Access Denied: The
archive of this list is not publicly available." Then there's a prompt
for a username and a password. I try the same username and password I
use to log in to egroups.com, and the Access Denied message repeats.
Presumably access to this group is limited in some other fashion, so I
just need to find out who runs the archive and how I can get in, right?

So I sent a message looking for some information to the (anonymous)
maintainer of the archive. I haven't heard back yet. I thought I'd
try James Andrews, since his name is on the (two-year-old) introductory
message
that pops up at http://www.eGroups.com/list/csound. But James has
nothing to do with it, and furthermore said that "I've looked at this
egroups thing before but I certainly wouldn't consider it for use as a
place to archive the csound list as it looks like a spam magnet to me."

Well, that's certainly a valid concern that should be addressed for any
potential online archive. What to do?

Anyone have any idea what this is all about? Who put that egroups
archive up there? Is it really a spam magnet? Should we get rid of it?
If not, how the heck do you get access to it?

Thanks for any replies,