[Mailman-Developers] HowTo: [Mailman-Users] Cleaning the archive by a list-owner

[Jon Carnes]

Straight Mailman (unmodified) won't let you do this.

I have some simple scripts that are password protected that do it for my 
admins.  They were a piece of cake to write.  Your sysadmin would have to 
install them for you.

For the sysadmin to modify the archives...
 - edit ~mailman/archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox
 - delete/modify any emails you want (normally delete older mail)
 - delete the old archive html files...
     rm -rf ~mailman/archives/private/<listname>/.*
 - recreate the archive html files...
     cd ~mailman
     bin/arch <listname>   \
       archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox

===

The email for the list is stored in mbox format (straight text) in a file in 
the archive directory.  You can easily edit this mailbox and then re-run the 
archives so that your changes are pushed out to the HTML area.

If you want to find the top of an email based on date:
   F_DATE="12 May 2002"  
   grep -n "^From: " | grep $F_DATE | top -1

This gives you first line of an email that came in on that date - and it 
prints out the line number in the file for that line...

To print out a file starting at a given line and continueing on to the end:
    F_NAME="~mailman/archive/private/mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox
    START=4093
    sed -n "$START, \$ p" $F_NAME > $F_NAME.bak

===
There are several ways to automate this, the easiest is via email, but html 
is not too much harder - especially if you are willing to allow simple CGI's. 
I leave this up to your imagination!  Take care,

Jon 

 --- Original Message: Sunday 12 May 2002 05:58 am ---
> Hi,
>
> How can a list-owner clean out the archive? Delete messages?
> When not, can the developers program it?
> It would be nice.
>
>
> Groetjes Danny Terweij