[Mailman-Users] Archive handling "^From .*" within email

[Federico Sevilla III]

Hi everyone,

I hope I am sending this to the right list. I do not know if this can be
classified as a bug, or if it should get clarified first so I'm not
filing a bug right away on the SourceForge bug tracking system. Please
cc me replies, as I am not on the list. Thank you very much.

I had recently started using Lurker[1] to archive mail. I host a number
of mailing lists using Mailman 2.0.12, and found out that I could use
the archives in archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox
directly, since Lurker uses as its source standard mbox files.

[1] http://lurker.sourceforge.net/

I've been in communication with the author of Lurker (Wesley Terpstra)
and one of the things we noted is that Mailman doesn't prepend lines the
pattern '^From .*' with a '>'. What happens is that software like Lurker
has difficulty figuring out whether the line begins a message, or is a
part of an existing message.  I checked the pipermail archives, and it
seems mmarch(8) (if this is a Debian-ism then the "arch" utlity is what
I mean) is what takes care of prepending these invalid From lines with
">".

According to Wesley Terpstra, standard mbox files should already have
lines beginning with "From" prepended with a '>' to distinguish them
from standard mbox From header lines that mark the beginning of new
mail. Please let me know if this assertion is incorrect, and if indeed
it is the archiving software that must figure this bit out.  If on the
other hand it is a bug, please let me know as well so I can file a bug
usign the bug tracking system.

Thank you very much for your time.

 --> Jijo

-- 
Federico Sevilla III   :  <http://jijo.free.net.ph/>
Network Administrator  :  The Leather Collection, Inc.
GnuPG Key ID           :  0x93B746BE
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/attachments/20020813/daa1133a/attachment.pgp