MarkMail is a free service for searching mailing list archives. They’ve just loaded 530,000 emails from 75 perl-related mailing lists into their index.

They’ve got a home page for searching these lists at http://perl.markmail.org/.

Of course the first thing people often do with new search engines is search for themselves. I’m no exception. Where MarkMail shines is the ability to drill-down into the results in many ways with a single click (bugs, announcements, attachments etc). Worth a look.

The graph of messages per month is not just cute, you can click and drag over a range of bars to narrow the search to a specific period. It clearly shows my activity rising sharply in 2001 and then dropping to a lower level after 2004.

I particularly pleased that they’ve indexed dbi-users, dbi-dev, and dbi-announce lists.