A related question: are mailing list archives available anywhere

    in any conventional email format, such as mbox?

    I don’t see much point in having the entire mailing list
    traffic in my inbox, but I might be interested in participating
    in some of the threads, and downloading a handful of mbox files
    and replying to messages there have worked quite well for me
    so far.

    FWIW, GNU.org has such archives available [1], as do some other
    free software projects.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/mbox/

--
FSF associate member #7257 http://am-1.org/~ivan/