For my own site, I rejected the awful Pipermail (default archiver with GNU Mailman) with its brutally ugly presentation format and text-only.
I found an alternative called Lurker, with a better web interface and some of the features you're mentioning, like threading.
I further customized Lurker. I gave it a button bar with custom icons, and hacked it to support in-line HTML (when people post HTML to the mailing list, it is integrated into the archive as HTML). Because that is dangerous, of course, I wrote a comprehensive HTML cleaner for that.
I welcome HTML in my mailing lists; it's time for mailing lists to retire "text only" rules. It improves the formatting of text, letting you use typewriter fonts, italics and bold appropriately, and real bullets.
Here is an archive message with in-line images, another benefit:
That does look better compared to other web interfaces I've seen in the past (though you still have to hover over the icon to view details of a message like the author and subject).
One decent interface I've seen is public-inbox (https://public-inbox.org/git/). It presents an overview with the subjects and threading and allows for downloading mbox files or using an atom feed link.
The nice thing is that these can be used in parallel. Using Lurker doesn't preclude me from also setting up public-inbox as an alternative presentation of the same archives.
For my own site, I rejected the awful Pipermail (default archiver with GNU Mailman) with its brutally ugly presentation format and text-only.
I found an alternative called Lurker, with a better web interface and some of the features you're mentioning, like threading.
I further customized Lurker. I gave it a button bar with custom icons, and hacked it to support in-line HTML (when people post HTML to the mailing list, it is integrated into the archive as HTML). Because that is dangerous, of course, I wrote a comprehensive HTML cleaner for that.
I welcome HTML in my mailing lists; it's time for mailing lists to retire "text only" rules. It improves the formatting of text, letting you use typewriter fonts, italics and bold appropriately, and real bullets.
Here is an archive message with in-line images, another benefit:
http://www.kylheku.com/lurker/message/20131110.004036.5ed128...
Here is discussion where you can see a branched tree view:
http://www.kylheku.com/lurker/message/20121127.210005.0ca78d...
Lurker mods: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lurker/
HTML cleaner: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/tree/
This lexically analyzes the HTML and filters out all unwanted tags, or unwanted attributes of otherwise wanted tags.
mbox archives reveal people's e-mails; you have to control access to those.