All list archives can be downloaded from many places. Once you have them all in a place, you can try doing nifty things like pattern analysis etc. If you're a real n3wb and UNIX/BSD/*nix looks fun still, you can use grep, sort, awk and even perl to do fun things with data stored in ASCII files from mail archives.
There are many tools to understand data. Big data is even more fascinating as you can pull too many things into compiling reports or patterns. Hadoop instances, AWS cloud options will allow you to deploy things like Micro Strategy based solutions that can then pull data to mine to create reports in real time. What I like about Micro Strategy is that they can produce complex reports with complex logic based on many data points. But now if you are still this far with me, you should consider working for the NSA. The technology is similar. OpenBSD mailing lists aren't really high traffic. Neither has the IRC been alive much in the #OpenBSD channels across most servers. So your data points may not be as big.. This might get me flamed, but say if you need a data point for a reference...you may very well run pattern analysis based on Theo's e-mails, their timing, content length, words used, similar words pattern analysis etc. to judge (yes, there are actually modelling options like this) when he is angry or happy. He is not a FB person much (Are you Theo?) but in truly geek style, FB status updates really are the old cvs commits to HEAD or CURRENT. So you can search those as well. Actually, in all honesty if you are interesting in something like this, many univ. offer courses on data these days. Happy hunting. Come back and tell us when he was the most mad!! Over the years, many a battle have been waged on these lists. Pop-corn worthy :) Bruno Delbono | Cognitive Researcher - Human Behavioural Project | Real Sociedad Española De Antropología | Royal Spanish Society Of Anthropology | ☎: +1 855 253 5436 ☎: +1 424 354 4700 | ✉: bruno.delb...@anthropology.es | ☞: Anthropology.ES | ✉: bruno.delb...@secure.af | ☞: Secure.AF | ☛: Mail.AC -----Original Message----- From: owner-m...@openbsd.org [mailto:owner-m...@openbsd.org] On Behalf Of Kasper Adel Sent: September 5, 2013 2:23 PM To: misc Subject: Data Mining/Crawling a Mailing List Hello, A bit off topic but i was looking for a way/tool that could crawl through a mailing list/news archives and try to filter most common discussions and things like that, if anyone is aware of such a tool, pls let me know. Thanks, Kim
