I know this may be quite a basic question but how exactly does the search
engine for this list work?

I see in the documentation you may tell swish-e to use META keywords in an
html file, but if you look at the HTML code for the archives, there are no
META tags in the individual messages.  Instead there are a bunch of lines
that look like this:

<!-- received="Sun Apr 14 16:08:35 2002 PDT" -->
<!-- sent="Sun, 14 Apr 2002 16:08:33 -0700 (PDT)" -->
<!-- name="Bill Moseley" -->
<!-- email="moseley@hank.org" -->
<!-- subject="[SWISH-E] What is Swish-e?" -->
<!-- id="3.0.3.32.20020414160626.033063d4@pop3.hank.org" -->
<!-- inreplyto="" -->

How are you telling swish-e to index, for example the author name or e-mail
address?

Is the configuration for the search engine available for download?

Thanks,

Paul Borghese