The intended behaviour for robots is to record the message pages and not the index pages. I do want the search engines to follow the links, which lead to meta-tag free message pages. This is what the internal search enine does. I didn't realize altavista and friends might act differently.
What's the problem with index pages? If the subject of the email is "cactus" and someone searches for "cactus"... a search engine will produce a double hit, one on the message page and one on the index page. Double matches are annoying. I'll take a look and see if I can change the meta tags / htdig settings so that both the internal search engine and the Altavista's of the world do the same thing. (If you happen to have a configuration setting to suggest I'll implement it that much quicker.) Thanks for the heads up, Jeff PS. If you do a search for "mail-archive.com" on Altavista, you should see a fair number of matches.
