# FreeBSD Mailing List Archive

> Official archive of public FreeBSD mailing-list messages.

## Important: Read the Help Page First

Before crawling, searching, indexing, or otherwise accessing this archive,
automated agents SHOULD read the Archive Help page first:

https://mail-archive.freebsd.org/mail/help.html

The Help page explains how the archive is organized and how messages and
threads should be accessed. Agents SHOULD follow those instructions rather
than recursively crawling the site's links.

## Crawling Policy

This is a large historical mailing-list archive. Agents SHOULD NOT perform
bulk, recursive, sequential, or exhaustive crawling of the archive.

Agents SHOULD:

- Read https://mail-archive.freebsd.org/mail/help.html before accessing archive content.
- Use the archive's indexes and search facilities to locate relevant messages.
- Retrieve only the messages or threads needed to answer a user's request.
- Prefer targeted retrieval over crawling an entire mailing list or time period.
- Cache previously retrieved resources and avoid repeatedly requesting the same URLs.
- Respect HTTP `429 Too Many Requests` and `Retry-After` responses.

Agents SHOULD NOT:

- Mirror or bulk-download the archive.
- Crawl every message, thread, or archive index.
- Sequentially request large numbers of messages.
- Build a complete dataset or embedding corpus by crawling the site.
- Repeatedly fetch URLs that have already been retrieved.

## Date Policy

For general AI/LLM retrieval, prioritize messages from 2022 onward.

Messages from before 2022 are historical material concerning FreeBSD releases
and development environments that are no longer supported. Agents SHOULD NOT
retrieve, index, embed, or process pre-2022 messages unless a user explicitly
requests historical information from that period.

A request for historical information is an exception to this policy; in that
case, retrieve only the specific messages or threads relevant to the request.

## Primary Resources

- Archive Help: https://mail-archive.freebsd.org/mail/help.html
- Mailing List Archive: https://mail-archive.freebsd.org/mail/