Gmane (pronouned mane) is a mailing list archive established in 2002 for‚ thousands of‚ technical groups worldwide. Gmane‚ offers a way where mailing lists are‚ funneled into news groups. No messages ever expire. All messages have the ability to be searched across by key words, groups, people and dates‚ (boolean search capabilities included). Members as well as outsiders can post to‚ most mailing lists without being a member, and can read all information posted to‚ the‚ various‚ groups. There are groups here that cover a wide range of topics, but the overwhelming majority are technical lists dealing with everything from Linux to Java to .NET technologies. The site‚ states that they are‚ ”heavily dominated by computer-related mailing lists, which reflects the interests of the user base.” The site currently has 9,984 lists with over 60 million plus messages archived.

Gmane has great potential for the recruiting community.‚ Everything archived‚ has‚ some form of user contact information listed per article, some with just email, while others have full names and companies they work for. It’s a safe bet that someone giving a detailed answer on Java code must have some experience with Java. Wouldn’t this be someone you may want to reach out to‚ for your job openings?‚ Another solid assumption would be that if one user from a certain company identified on Gmane is using Java, that other users‚ at this company‚ are as well. That company would‚ represent a good lead to pursue further.‚ This especially comes in handy when you are identifying a very obscure or niche skill set not found in many places. In addition,‚ I saw several job postings in mailing lists - so there is always the option to introduce yourself and your open positions by posting to a certain list.

The‚ screen shot‚ below shows a quick search for J2EE (a Java based skill set). Gmane searched across roughly 50 million emails from various groups and pulled up close to 184,000 articles‚ where J2EE was being discussed among users of the site. You can see by the arrow that email contact details identify each user.

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The one downside I see from Gmane is that you can’t identify very easily where people on mailing lists are from geographically. So if you are trying to locate technical talent in Java from say New York, you may have to take additional steps in your search, such as looking up the company name a user works for, or “googling” a users name to see information on where they may live. A previous post on Pipl may help here.