[Mailman-Users] pipermail vs hypermail

[Bob Stout]

On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, Irene Sakellarakis wrote:

> We're looking into using Mailman to replace our current Majordomo setup.
> We're running into a problem with respect to pipermail, however. We have
> extensive archives under a hacked hypermail format.
>
> We need to keep all our archives together, whether that be in piper- or
> hyper-mail. I could use some advice on whether it's possible to use the
> Mailman archiving features to incorporate other mail-based archives.

Before my own stupidity blew things up, I had successfully imported some
large Listproc archives in mbox format to Mailman. There are a few issues
to be aware of though...

1.  As you might gather from my tale of woe, the arch utility's exception
    handling is less than stellar. Always back up everything before you
    attempt this. And, by all means, check in advance that you aren't
    going to run out of apparent disk space in the middle of the job!

2.  Exception handling isn't arch's only shortcoming. Its parse engine
    does tent to get confused easily. My solution was to use...

    formail +1 -ds procmail

    to process the old archives rather than let arch try to split it. I
    then went through Pine and manually deleted malformed messages before
    importing the resulting Pine folder into Mailman. It sounds a lot more
    cumbersome and time-consuming than it really is...

3.  After getting everything imported, I haven't been able to get the sort
    by thread feature of the archive page to work correctly. Sorting by
    date or poster seems to work OK, though. To me, this isn't a  show-
    stopper, but YMMV...

-------------------------------------------------------------
MicroFirm: Down to the C in chips...
   Home of the SNIPPETS archives and the
   DIY Loudspeaker Driver Selection Guide (LDSG):
http://www.snippets.org/