Email is an ever increasing stream of information. Most people do not have time to read all the email that they might be interested in. This is where lurker can help.

After being subscribed to interesting mailing lists, lurker archives all incoming mail into a database. Old mail can also be imported. Once mail is in the database, lurker can help you search the unending noise for those gems you need to read.

A web-browser is used to interact with lurker. This makes lurker useful for mailing list administrators, who can deploy lurker on the host of several related lists. It also enables private users to access their lurker installation from anywhere in the world.

Lurker is not just another mailing list archiver. It is capable of handling gigabytes of mail without slowing down. Lurker has been designed to scale to support sites with thousands of concurrent users and hundreds of new messages a second. If you run a high-volume mailing list archive, you should seriously consider lurker for this alone.

To facilitate finding interesting data, lurker supports:

• full keyword search by body, subject, author, ...
• a graphical representation of message relationships
• charts of the current activity about a topic
• searching lists or queries around an estimated time
• signature verification to confirm the author
• messages markup to find related information

As one would expect, lurker also supports file attachments, multiple languages, message threading, gpg key photo ids, a transactional database, automatic timezone detection, render caching, xml customization with xslt and css, multiple front-ends (3-tier deployment), and many other buzz words.

Lurker works best with mozilla, internet explorer, konqueror, safarri, opera, and lynx. Other browsers, most notably netscape4, can use lurker, but it will be quite ugly. Lurker has been tested on Linux, *BSD, Solaris, MacOS X, and windows/mingw. However, it is easiest to setup in Debian/GNU Linux.