[Mailman-Users] HowTo edit Archives by hand

[Jim Popovitch]

A side effect of doing this is that the re-generated html files are not
necessarily referenced as they used to be.  Thus if there are other
references to these files (such as this one:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2002-July/021154.html) they
will be incorrect/invalid after a re-arch.

-Jim P.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 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
>