The archives can be searched via email by sending a message to
<[log in to unmask]> - leaving the subject line blank - and
writing in the body of the message:  GET RAW-FOOD DB-SEARCH.  The
archives can be searched this way just as effectively as with the web
search engine though it might take a little longer waiting for the
StJohns server to respond between each request. On the plus side the
wait should never be as long as sometimes can be experienced with the
web, and email search gives people who do not have web access the
ability to get to the archives as well.

To retrieve archives by the month and search them with private text
editor, send a message to <[log in to unmask]> - leaving
the subject line blank - and write in the body of the message:  GET
RAW-FOOD LOGyymm. (the yy stands for the year (e.g. 97) and mm for the
month (e.g. 06)

We have been having some trouble in the transfer of some of archives
from bolis.com due to the Stjohns server having problems identifying
the sometimes incomplete or inconsistent address configurations of some
of our subscribers. This means that when doing a search for a specific
author or when sorting the messages of a specific month by author,
certain contributors to the list will not show up even though their
messages are hiding in the archives attached to somebody elses message
( these are easy to spot as they usually are the ones that show up
being more than 100k)  The people in question are Stefan Joest, Bob
Wynman, Sandy Labedz, Ward Nicholson, John Coleman, Laurie Forti and a
few others. Except for in July 1997 the only month that is archived
normally, no or only very few listings of these people can be found in
the archives. A separate problem is that October 1996 is missing and
has mistakenly been replaced by June 1997 which is now showing twice.
Dave is working at solving these problems and will announce to the list
whent they are fixed.  Luckily, my part of the work with the archives
is now over :-) so if anybody finds any more kinks or omissions please
contact Dave at  <[log in to unmask]> so we can get them straightened out
as soon as possible.

The archives have been trimmed down from about 13MB to about 8MB. The
one part of what was deleted was the routing and text style information
in the headers of each message that had to be modified to fit the
requirements of the StJohns server along with the bottom banners and
long signatures.  The other part was clutter such as duplicate messages
or responses poorly edited if at all or messages without any real
content or purpose.  As an example some but by no means all of Bhodis
scanned messages were either trimmed or deleted.  Even though it was
tempting ;-), no messages were censored for content and many of
questionable nature were kept for educational reasons.  Example: Lauri
Forti a fruitarian fanatic who was kicked off the list in May 1996 for
his zealotry, his posts even though they contain a lot of IMO dangerous
nutritional recommendations have remained untouched.
NB! Those who were opposed to the list changing name from veg-raw to
raw-food seven months ago might be interested in knowing that the
archives reveal that topics such as raw meat and eating instinctively
have been regular topics on the list since February 1996.

The search engine is user friendly and very handy especially when
refining the search. If any difficulties should occur, the "help"
function gives easy to follow instructions on how to make full use of
the search features.

Happy searching!

Best, Peter
[log in to unmask]

PS.  For some reason I have not been receiving messages from the list
since yesterday morning  and as a lesson of what not to do when wanting
to change or get information about personal subscription status,
remember to send requests to <[log in to unmask]> and NOT
address them to the list as I just did twice in a row.