Charlie's Porsche Mailing List Information

NOTICE:	Charlie Kindel (and www.kindel.com) has no affilliation with the old PorscheFans website and mailing lists. The information found here is provided as a public service.
NOTE:	On April 22, 1998 the PorscheFans listmaster disabled access to the list digests on www.porschefans.com. Thus searches you do here will only find messages sent before that date. I have all messages sent between April 22, 1998 and when PorscheFans was superceeded by PorscheList (now RennList) (May 25, 1998) and will be adding them to the archives soon.
	March, 1999 - PorscheList has been renamed RennList due to trademark issues. Go to http://www.rennlist.org now!
	May 29, 1998 - Before PorscheList, and before PorscheFans, there was PorschePhiles. Never before have the PorschePhiles archives been available online in a searchable form. But they are available here, now! Simply choose "PorschePhiles" as the list you want to search in on the query page. For more history click here.
	May 25, 1998 - There's a new List Server in town! A group of dedicated Porsche enthusiasts have created a high-quality replacement for PorscheFans and it's called Rennlist (originally PorscheList). Go to http://www.rennlist.org to find out more and to subscribe. The old PorscheFans archives are still available here for your searching pleasure.

Search The Old PorscheFans and PorschePhiles Archives

The PorschePhiles mailing list was active from sometime in the late '80s through 1996 when it was replaced by PorscheFans. PorscheFans lasted for about 2 years before being superceeded by PorscheList (now called RennList) in May 1998. Using the search engine here you can still search all the old PorscheFans and PorschePhiles message archives.

Click on the link below to go to the search page and try it out!

Search the PorscheFans and PorschePhiles Archvies

Note the PorschePhiles archives I have only cover April 1990 through July 1995. I'm still looking for the archives prior to 1990 and between 1995 and May 1996 when PorscheFans was started. If you have them and want to share, let me know!

You can search the RennList archives by going to the RennList web site at http://www.porschelist.org.

If you have comments or suggestions about this search engine please send me mail (charlie@kindel.com).

Known Problems and What's Next?

I'm constantly trying to improve the way this system works. Perhaps someday I'll get sick of working on it and leave it well enough alone. But for now there some little quirks that I want to iron out...

The PorschePhiles archives I have only cover April 1990 through July 1995. I'm still looking for the archives prior to 1990 and between 1995 and May 1996 when PorscheFans was started. If you have them and want to share, let me know!
The PorschePhiles archives are stored in files covering a month each. Therefore searching is less granular than with the PorscheFan lists. I will work on splitting the messages out like I did with PorscheFans but it will take some time.
On April 22, 1998 the PorscheFans listmaster disabled access to the list digests on www.porschefans.com. Thus searches you do here will only find messages sent before that date. I have all messages sent between April 22, 1998 and when PorscheFans was superceeded by PorscheList (May 25, 1998) and will be adding them to the archives soon.
You have to hit the Execute button to run the query. You can't just type your query string in the box and hit the Enter key. If you do, nothing happens. This really bugs me.
I want to add more options to the query form such as date range, number of hits to return per page, sent to, sent by, subject, etc...
I want to provide more ways of viewing the list of hits.
The current "Summary Highlight"and "Full Highlight" views are really ugly.
I want to build some pre-canned queries based on the most commonly submitted queries. I can do this because I am currently logging every query that is run against the system.
I want to provide "back" and "next" links in the messages. This way you can click through all the messages in a query, viewing the each message as you go.

Do you have ideas and suggestions for making this better? Please let me know by sending mail to charlie@kindel.com.

History

Monday, April 20, 1998	My first attempt at providing a searchable archive. I had things setup so that I was sucking down each day's digest as a whole file and the Content Indexer was indexing over these digest files. This worked OK, but it was too hard to navigate around the results of a query. Also the abstracts provided were useless because they contained nothing but the mail header junk from the first message in the digest.
Wednesday, April 22, 1998	The BETA of Version 2.0 deployed. I re-engineered the application so that as it sucked down the daily messages from www.porschefans.com it spit each message out in it's own formatted HTML file. This really makes searching easier and now the abstracts are totally useful in identifying the contents of a message at a glance.
Wednesday, April 29, 1998	Version 2.0 finalized. Mostly HTML formatting changes. Things now look good on all browsers I've tested (most versions of IE, Netscape, and Opera).
Monday, May 25, 1998	PorscheList is announced!
Friday, May 29, 1998	The PorschePhiles archives were added.