Hey Ned.  Persisting the archive on the class side is something I've been thinking about for a while -- how cool that you're working on it!
Re: choosing between the four persistence options you asked about: a cheezy way out would be to have a method for each option, and allow the user to set their preference.  Personally I like option #3.

I'm looking forward to seeing your async load.  I've been thinking that maybe the BFAV should run a task in the background where it polls http://swiki.gsug.org/sqfixes/last (at a user-defined interval) and kicks off loading updates in the background if the value for "last" has changed.  What do you think?  Is the feature worth the back-end complexity?

I'd really like to keep the entire archive loaded.  Have you already tried implementing loading the text on-demand, when the list item is selected?.  I wonder how much memory that would save.  

BTW, When the BugFixArchive adds an ArchivePost object to its internal store, the ArchivePost object already saves its attachment MailMessage objects to the filesystem and replaces its 'attachments' ivar with a list of filenames.  In the same vein, in my current working version, the ArchivePost has a 'sourceDocument' ivar that is initially the MailMessage object, then the filename for the saved file.

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