Well this is exactly how I managed to get a lot of free food and cruft back in the days when I was an undergrad at MIT. There was a mailing list for this stuff called Reuse, but rather than subscribe to the mailing list (whose servers were slow), I subscribed instead to the Zephyr class of the corresponding discuss archive and pulled the message out of the archive -- often 30-60 seconds before the e-mails would show up in peoples' inboxes. Too bad it doesn't work anymore after they switched to Mailman and killed the discuss archive.