Emails in a Blog

I run a mailing list for local movie buffs. I’ve always been frustrated by the web based archives that the list software creates. Basically I want to be able to use it the way I use a blog. I want to tag posts, search by author, full text search, permalink, 2 level message threading (instead of the n level of threading it currently does).

I quickly wrote something to pull new emails out of a pop3 account and post new messages via the MetaWeblog API to a Wordpress blog, and then followup emails as comments to the post. While this was a little tricky because of broken Microsoft mail clients and Wordpress comment throttling threading it more or less works.

The big problem is that emails on a mailing list are not blog posts. People have giant signatures, Microsoft adds garbage markup, people will reply to a message and start a completely new thread, some email responses contain copies of every message in the thread. What might be considered a feature in email is noise in a blog post or comment.

I can’t figure out how to handle all the noise in each email. I’m beginning to think the whole experiment is misguided because people use the mailing list more like an instant message chat, than a place for discussions needing to be archived.