[Mailman-Users] Managing archives

[Jon Carnes]

I'll give it a shot on one of my boxes (create a soft link to the mbox
into my mailbox) and let you know... It *should* work.

On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 11:18, Victor Tsaran wrote:
> Hi, John!
> Do you think the access to the mbox can also be done through IMAP? I am not
> an administrator on this machine, just a list admin, but I need to know what
> to tell the root.
> Regards,
> Victor
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Carnes [mailto:jonc at nc.rr.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 10:55 AM
> To: vtsaran at icevi.org
> Cc: mailman-users at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Managing archives
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 09:26, Victor Tsaran wrote:
> > Hello, listers!
> > Here is my situation. I am managing several lists for an international
> > organization. Over the last couple of years our archives have grown quite
> > large and, I am sure, that many of the messages are no longer necessary to
> > keep. What is the easiest way for me to pull down the whole archive,
> convert
> > it to something that can be reviewed/edited by the organization's
> secretary,
> > pull it back together and reupload back to the server. Is there a tool
> that
> > will allow me to do this? I myself don't have the time to carry out this
> > task, however, I cannot expect the secretary to fool around with Unix mail
> > boxes etc.
> > Also, I have seen some web sites that zip their messages while archiving.
> > How is this done?
> > Thanks much for any response I can get on this.
> > Regards,
> > Vic
> > ------------------------------------------------------
> 
> You should be able to set it up so that the secretary can simply browse
> the archive emails via an email program and then delete the messages he
> thinks are not necessary.
> 
> Mailman archives are stored in an mbox file on the server
> 
> If you copy the mbox file to a computer running evolution (that's what I
> currently use for my email - and its great!) then he can read the
> messages as though they are simply local messages in the INBOX (or some
> other folder that you create). Once he deletes the extraneous messages,
> he does an "expunge" or rebuild on the mailbox! Now you have a new mbox
> that is ready to be copied back up to the Mailman archives.
> 
> Once the mbox is put back in place, you will need to run the
> ~mailman/bin/arch command to rebuild the archives using the new mbox
> file.
> 
> Aside: I wonder how hard it would be to build a web interface for
> editing the archives?  We could use formail to break-out each of the old
> messages and move them into a holding directory, then scan the holding
> directory to get the subject/date from each message. Display those with
> a link to pull up the whole message, and a checkbox for deleting the
> message.
> 
> Once you click done, the back-end cgi would reassembles the mbox by just
> cat-ing the remaining files back together - then it would back up the
> old mbox file and put this one in place. After that, it would run the
> Mailman arch program for the list.
> 
> OR it would probably be easier to use the existing pipermail setup but
> add a delete field for use by an admin (running pipermail from a
> specified ip or from localhost), then use the built-in python libraries
> for handling mbox - after all, you are just deleting a message from an
> mbox file and that is a fairly boring/mundane task.
> 
> Jon Carnes
> 
>