The cacti_etc archives contain all of the discussions in the list since
1994.

You interact with the cacti_etc archives in the same way as you manage
your cacti_etc subscription: by sending commands in an e-mail to the
mailing list software, and receiving the results in a reply mail. 

To do this, you send mail to listproc@opus.scs.agilent.com, with
the command as the only content of the mail. The command must be a
line of text in the body of the mail; you may leave the subject line
blank. After you've sent the mail containing the command, the reply
should come back to you after a couple of minutes.

There is a way to search the archive files for a particular subject.  As
an example, if you send a command to listproc@opus.scs.agilent.com such
as:

    search cacti_etc "euphorbia"

the listserver will return a list of all archive files that contain that
word along with the lines from each file that match.  Care is required.
In the case of the above word, there will be 4500 lines returned about
euphorbia references.  In such a case, it is better to restrict the search
as in the command:

   search cacti_etc "euphorbia&sap"

which will find lines in which both "euphorbia" and "sap" appear, which
amounts to only 100 lines of information returned.  Unfortunately there
seems to be no way to search for both words in an article but perhaps
not on the same line.  Send the command "help search" to learn more.  A
fairly complex example shows how to search for "(oranges and not apples)
or Mandarins"

Once you know the name and section of an archive file you want, retrieve
it with a command like:

   get cacti_etc cacti_etc.jan97 3

which would get the third section of the monthly archive of cacti_etc
for January of 1997.

Other useful listserver commands include:

to list all commands that you can use:

   help

to read help text specific to the 'search' command:

   help search

to list the names of all archive files for cacti_etc:

   index cacti_etc

to retieve the whole cacti_etc archive for January, 1997:

   get cacti_etc cacti_etc.jan97

These commands must also be sent in the "body" of the message
to the special address listproc@opus.scs.agilent.com.