Mailing lists archives

[Gerard Beekmans]

Howdy,

Part of the archives are currently disabled due to excessive bandwidth 
consumption. A robots.txt file was installed to prevent search engines 
from keep downloading all the archived messages all the time. There were 
months it incurred hundreds of gigs in server uploads.

Trying to download the *.txt files will return a 403 "access denied" 
error. I remember setting that up at least a year if not two years ago. 
I guess it took a while for it to be noticed.

The real problem were the multitude of automated/recursive downloads. 
The entire mailinglist archive currently holds about 5 GB of data so you 
  can imagine it doesn't take many people trying to conveniently 
download everything available to cause problems.

Gerard