I've been doing this for a while,
total of 809 messages, all the
way back as far as Gerry would let
me pull them.  about 500mb is all
(see below) you have to figure out the
magic incantations to have the listserv
ship you the articles.  Even then, I found
some gaps, etc:

The problem is that Gmail truncates the
messages, so it still needs a bit
of massaging.

You can put google desktop on your
PC as well and point it to that same
gmail account and let it index away.

I use it mainly to index my unwieldly
amount of email and archives from the
past 10 years on the job, the vanagon
index is a side benefit.

(I turn off the indexing of my web history
 as well as the 'cache on googles pages'
 feature, in the interest of some modicum of
 security / privacy :-)

Not perfect, but sometimes works when I dont
want to wade through or wait for 'Gerry' to get
back with results.

Havent really had the time or inclination to
work on it further, but could be easily automated
by a programmer with some time on his/her hands
(i.e. retired?)

 -tim

90 syncro westy
mesa, az