When you want to subscribe to a mailing list, there is always a tip that suggests you search the FAQ or archives first to see if anyone has already posted the same topic that you meet. Some mailing-list archive sites do not support searching function, while, some others do.
Here I will introduce some very famous archive sites to you; especially you are interested in some opensource projects such as Apache Software Foundation, BSD, JBoss...
Nabble: The first archive site is Nabble. It is free, simple and embeddable. It uses the same structure to support different types of stuff, such as Forum, Blog, Photo Gallery, FAQ...
In Nabble, you can start a free forum, start a blog, start a mailing-list, start a photo gallery and create a newspaper, which are only need simple steps to finish them.
Go and have a look @ http://n2.nabble.com/ OR http://www.nabble.com.
You can start a forum even without registering!
MARC: Mailing lists ARChives.
Maybe the most famous mailing lists archive site. It hosts so many projects such as WWW, GNU, Python, Apache, PHP, UNIX, Network/Infrastructure, Mozilla, Linux, KDE project, Java, Information Security, Database, BSD and misc.
It supports search engine function, then you can search the mailing list with the problem that you met, then you may get the very similar topic which already been solved.
Go and do a search @ http://marc.info .
Apache Mailing List: It is a mailing list hosted by Apache Software foundation, and only contains mailing lists of itself, but so many opensource projects hosted by it.
It does not support search function.
Mailing lists @ http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/
MarkMail: A famous mailing list archive site. It hosted by MarkLogic Company. MarkMail is a free service demonstrating the capabilities and power of MarkLogic Server using email as a content source. Each email is stored as an XML document, and accessed using XQuery. All searches, faceted navigation, analytic calculations, and HTML page renderings are performed on a single MarkLogic Server machine running against millions of messages.
Some most famous projects:(I DO NOT KNOW WHY PICTURES CAN NOT BE INSERTED HERE.)
Go and have a look @ http://markmail.org/
Gmane: Gmane is a mailing list archive. Any public mailing list can be carried by Gmane, but the vast majority of the lists here deal with free software.