[Mailman-Developers] Re: 2006 archives already online!

[Owen Taylor]

Marc MERLIN <marc_news@valinux.com> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 09:28:51PM +0200, Fil wrote:
> > @ Darrell Fuhriman (darrell@grumblesmurf.net) :
> > > That's why under "archival options" you'll find:
> > > 
> > >  "Set date in archive to when the mail is claimed to have been
> > >  sent, or to the time we resend it?"
> > > 
> > > If you leave it on 'when sent', you deserve the mess you'll get
> > > in your archives.
> > 
> > "When sent" is the default. How do you change the default to "When Resent"?
> > Shouldn't it be changed in the mailman's Defaults.py ?
> 
> I very firmly believe this, and so do all the people who have archives
> showing messages with dates of 2004 or 1990.
> http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/
> 
> I've asked the same thing in the past, but it didn't go through.

What I did for the gnome.org archives (using mhonarc plus custom
perl) is to used the Received: header for the date.

Which is, almost always, quite close to the time the person
actually sent it, and assuming that your local server's time
isn't screwed up (which is a much bigger problem...) does
not have the 2004 problem.

And it has the advantage over clobber_date of:

 - Not munging the mail
 - Not being skewed by moderation delays
 - Being independent of the archiving process, so if you
   import a bunch of old mail with incorrect Date: lines
   into the archiving process you still get the 2004 
   protection.

I haven't looked at the clobber_date implementation recently,
so I don't know if these problems have been otherwise 
addressed.

This approach has, anyways, worked well for the 140k messages
on mail.gnome.org. I wouldn't be suprised if it has defects
though.

Regards,
                                        Owen