[Mailman-Users] HowTo edit Archives by hand

[Jon Carnes]

I think this is already in the FAQ, but just in case, here is a brief run 
through for the 2.0.x series...

The archives are found in:
  ~mailman/archives/private/

There are two subdirectories for each list:

  <listname>.mbox:  This directory contains one file, a text based 
        Mailbox with all the archived messages.  This file is the 
        *real* archive.

  <listname> : This directory contains all the manufactured Web/text
        files needed to display the archived messages.  The files in
        this directory are all generated from the Mailbox found in the
        other directory.

To edit out an email,
  - Take mailman off-line (stopping cron is effective for this).
  - Goto the Mailbox containing the archive
  - Edit this large file and remove the offending email

      Note: this is a large text based file containing
      many emails, each stacked on top of each other 
      inside the file.  Each email starts with a line like:
        "From user at domain.com  Mon Mar 12 14:23 2002"

      There will be other lines in the email that look similar 
      and start with "From: " (note the colon instead of a space)
         "From: User Name <user at domain>"
      These lines are header lines inside the email.

  - Once the offending emails are edited or removed,
     move the files in the current web files for the archive
     to a backup directory and run:
       ~mailman/bin/arch  <listname> 
     This will regenerate all the HTML files used by the archive.
  - Bring mailman back on-line (restart cron)

Best of luck,

Jon Carnes

On Wednesday 17 July 2002 10:22 am, Phil Greenwood wrote:
> I am brand new at this and am setting up a mail list.  I have run into a
> problem that may be my stupidity, but I can't figure it out.
> If someone posts something to a mail list that is off (rude, defamatory,
> illegal) I want to be able to delete the entry from the archive.  I also
> want to delete all my "test messages" before I bring other people into
> the mail list.   I have searched the FAQ's and although python.org FAQs
> includes an entry on removing a post (3.3), the solution depends on
> running a script or command.  I have no idea how to do that or even how
> to find the archive (other than through the normal web browser
> interface).  Can anyone give me some basic (noddy language) clues as to
> how to do this?
> Phil