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Not for emails that were sent before you subscribed.

(and that means new contributors get the worse experience.. not ideal)

Lot of mailing lists offer the option to download mbox with old messages. So you can just download those for months/years when you were not subscribed.

they do? I don't think I've ever seen this in practice. And even if I do, having to download dozens of monthly archives is pretty annoying.

(Also for example SourceForge only gives mbox files to administrators, not to regular users [0])

[0] https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mailing%20List...

I mostly read GNU mailing lists, and there mbox is offered https://lists.gnu.org/archive/mbox/ . Linux seems to offer a git repositories with the messages, which is bit annoying, but script-able.

Well, it is not perfect, much still, the hassle is one-time, so meh.

It's one-time for one project, but is a repeated hassle over multiple projects, and likely a different hassle at that.

Sourcehut's specifically allows download of the full mailing list, or just the last 30 days.

Threads can also be downloaded individually.

And the search function is decent(ish) in the web interface.

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