I'm presently cursing whoever changed the configuration/names of Wikipedia lists. Identifying emails in archives is sadly a difficult problem, it really need not be, but fortunately the good folks at the aimsgroup MARC also archive the lists and associate the unique identifier of every message with a persistent and unique URL, as I wrote about previously. But when Wikipedia moved its lists from "foo@wikimedia.org" to "foo@lists.wikimedia.org" it not only broke email filters across the land, it broke the MARC archives evidently. No message is available in the MARC archive since the change, on January 6. Now, Wikipedians are realizing that many of the links from the Wikis to email messages (e.g., referencing a message on the Wikimedia Foundation list) are broken.
My backlog of email messages to scrutinize is growing as I hope Hank Leininger and the other volunteers at MARC find the time and means to address the problem. What would be great is if Wikipedia and other users of archive software (i.e., mailman) pressed for stable references to messages as a priority feature!