In case others might be interested and appreciating a bit of help recalling what the search feature's development status is at the moment, this email spawned from a thread in June 2012, here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg12921.html

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Chris Cargile <follybeachris@gmail.com>wrote:

...

** I have been facing some of the installation/configuration/CLI issues Jessy mentions and agree the documentation could call out a bit more explicitly the proper steps but all the same good progress is being made!

I'm hoping to complete the same 'create new mailing lists' step that Jessy pointed to http://packages.python.org/mailman/src/mailman/commands/docs/create.html, but I did not install via the python-installation procedure.. rather, I completed the Ubuntu tutorial located here: https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/mailman.html

A mailman instance is successfully running, but this installation has left me without (as far as I can find) certain bin/ commands to be run in the interpreter, including mailman (as in, e g: 'mailman info'). I am wondering if there is a simple way to access the functionality described in the python docs pages, such that importing the various zope,etc modules will work in the CLI, without rebuilding mailman from scratch (using the python build-out procedure)

I hope I can make this work, but seeing as how my end-goal is to better learn the basics of a programming language that is probably better-position for future viability (-->Python) than ones I'd taken up previously (ie: php), in addition to developing for the mailman utility, I will remain in a good position either way :)

• my end-goal with this endeavor is the create a script that accepts mlist as the argument and generates a separate file for each email (pickle?) in the list archive. Achieving this will allow me to more easily create the search interface I'm after which I'm hoping will become a proof-of-concept implementation for the "search engine for archives" to-do list feature <http://list.org/todo.html>.

As I interpret this goal, another way of saying this I think is: "it would be great if list administrators could drop-in a module to deploy an html form-search interface that indexes previous archives, in addition to allowing mail-archive.com to archive future messages to the list."