I'm happy to let you all know that MarkMail (a free email archive site, launched in November) has started hosting the archives of the ruby-lang lists. You can find them here:
We focus a lot on analytics, and every query gets its own histogram activity chart. For example, here's the posts by Matz over time:
http://ruby-lang.markmail.org/search/from:"Yukihiro%20Matsumoto"
For a discussion comparing the holistic Ruby traffic graphs to those of Groovy:
The search result screen gives you lots of ways to refine your search (by sender, list, attachment type, etc). Plus we did a lot with keyboard shortcuts. You can hit "n" and "p" to move to the next and previous result and "j" and "k" to move up and down the thread view. If your result message includes Office or PDF files they're in-line interactive too. Example:
http://ruby-lang.markmail.org/search/ext:pdf+dbc
The subdomain you use implicitly limits the messages you search. Thus http://ruby-lang.markmail.org searches only lists with "ruby-lang" in their name. If you go to http://ruby.markmail.org it includes those and also some Apache and WSO2 lists focusing on Ruby. You can go to http://markmail.org to search across all lists.
I hope you all find this useful! More info about the site and why we're doing it is in the FAQ (http://markmail.org/docs/faq.xqy). Let me know if you have any questions.
Notes on using the site:
* Search using keywords as well as from:, subject:, extension:, list:, and date: constraints. The question mark graphic gives samples.
* The GUI doesn't yet expose it, but you can negate any search item, like -subject:soap
* Remember to use "n" and "p" keyboard shortcuts to navigate the search results
* You're going to want JavaScript enabled
-jh-