KernelTrap now provides a useful interface for reading numerous kernel-related mailing lists. At this time, we are actively archiving multiple Linux, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD mailing lists. In addition to providing a simple online browsing interface, we also provide multiple RSS feeds for each of our archived mailing lists.

Mailing Lists
At this time we are archiving more than 40 mailing lists, most of which are directly related to free and open source kernel development. We will continue to add new interesting mailing lists to our archives over time. If you'd like to see a specific mailing list added to our archives, please leave a comment here or send an email to jeremy@kerneltrap.org.

Our online mail archives were created because the vast majority of KernelTrap's content comes from these very mailing lists. We've also created an administrative interface allowing us to quickly build properly formatted articles which include links back to the original message postings. (Note that the subject of every message quoted in our articles now includes a link to the message in our archives, making it possible for you to quickly scan the rest of the discussed mailing list thread.)

RSS Feeds
We provide an RSS feed for each of our mailing lists. When browsing one of our mail archives, your browser or RSS reader should be able to auto-detect our feeds. In addition, visible RSS links are provided on pages that have feeds.

RSS feeds are provided for each author posting to each one of our mailing list archives. For example, it is possible to subscribe to an RSS feed of all messages posted by Linus Torvalds to the Linux Kernel mailing list. To locate such a feed, find a message from the author you are interested in, click on his or her name, then auto-detect or click the RSS icon on the resulting search page.

Examples of popular author-based RSS feeds:

• linux-kernel: Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, Ingo Molnar, Alan Cox
• linux-netdev: Jeff Garzik, David Miller, Andrew Morton, Alan Cox
• git: Junio Hamano, Linus Torvalds
• openbsd-misc: Theo de Raadt
• openbsd-source-changes: Theo de Raadt
• dragonflybsd-kern: Matthew Dillon
• dragonflybsd-commit: Matthew Dillon

Finally, RSS feeds are also provided for each thread posted to a mailing list. To locate such a feed, find a message from the thread you are interested in then click on the subject. On the resulting search page auto-detect or click the RSS icon.

Navigating Mail Archives
Navigating the KernelTrap mail archives should be relatively intuitive. A complete list of all mailing lists that we are currently archiving can be found at http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive. Clicking on a mailing list name will take you to a view of the latest messages posted to that list. If there are more than 50 messages posted to the list on that day, you will find a "pager" at the bottom of the screen allowing you to see additional messages. It is possible to sort messages by thread, author, and date. Also at the bottom of the screen you can navigate to the previous or the next day which messages were posted to the mailing list. Finally, at the top of the screen you can find small "breadcrumbs" allowing you to zoom your view out to the entire month, entire year, or entire archives of the given mailing list.

Clicking the subject of a message on the overview page will show you the contents of that message. In the header, you will find links allowing you to navigate to the previous and next posts in the current thread, by the current author, or sorted by date. You can click on the author's name or email address to see all messages by this author (and to find an RSS feed of all messages by this author). You can click on the message's subject to search for all messages with this or a similar subject.

When viewing messages, quoted text from previous messages will be automatically detected and "collapsed". Clicking the "quoted text" link will cause the quoted text to appear within the message. This feature makes it easy to read through a thread and find the original text in each message. Visitors with KernelTrap user accounts who don't like this default configuration can set a preference in their account to make the default action for quoted text be uncollapsed.

Finally, at the bottom of the message you are viewing you will find a list of all messages in the current thread, allowing you quick navigation through the thread. For messages that aren't part of a thread, messages with a similar subject will be listed here.

Searching By Message-ID
If you know the Message-ID of a specific message from your local mail program and wish to email a link to this message without browsing our archives and finding it, you can manually enter the URL as follows:

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/message-id/<Message-ID>

Replace "<Message-ID>" above with the actual Message-ID of the message you sent to the mailing list. You can limit the search in our archives to a specific mailing list by appending the name of the mailing list to the above URL, for example:

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/message-id/<Message-ID>/linux-kernel

Here is an example search with a real Message-ID, linking to a posting by Linus Torvalds:

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/message-id/alpine.LFD.0.999.0709191605...

If the MessageID exists in our archives multiple times, you will be presented with a list of all matches. For example:

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/message-id/46DA194F.9030303@garzik.org

Configuration
Visitors logged into KernelTrap user accounts will be able to configure mail archive settings by clicking the 'My account' link in their navigation block. We will add additional configuration options as necessary based on user feedback.

Planned Improvements
We will continue to improve our mailing list archives based on user feedback and our own experiences. In particular, we are working to improve the theme of the mail archives, specifically to ensure that all message text is visible and easily readable. Behind the scenes, we will continue to tweak the database queries and improve caching to boost performance and allow you to quickly navigate our archives. We are also integrating our archives with spam filters to automatically detect and filter out spam messages. Finally, we are exploring options for providing an efficient search engine for the messages in our archives.

Feedback and Suggestions
We are very interested in your feedback and suggestions on how we can improve our mailing list archives, making them more useful for you. Please post your comments here, or send email to jeremy@kerneltrap.org.