Support Start > Email > Advanced Email Questions > Mailman Mailing Lists > Mailman Archive Limits

We use the MHonArc list archive system with the Namazu search engine for list searches.

This combination is much more elegant than the standard Mailman “pipermail” archive system, which is ugly and doesn’t offer searching.

MHonArc and Namazu treat all the list messages as one big archive, rather than creating a separate archive for each month like pipermail. This is an improvement, but it means that MHonArc and Namazu use more resources than pipermail, and they may not be able to archive as many messages for a very large list.

We’ve tested MHonArc and Namazu with list archives of up to 100,000 messages. If you have a list that generates more messages than that, the archive or searching may not work properly — you may need to use your own custom Mailman archiving system if you want to keep archives.

Also, keep in mind that the archive search system is designed for English text. It works with some other languages, but not with all — in particular, it doesn't work well for languages that don't use Roman scripts. If you need searchable archives for non-English text, you may need to use a separate system that we don’t provide.

Finally, if your list contains more than 10,000 existing archived messages, your archive search index might be updated only once an hour for performance reasons.