[Mailman-Users] Populating archives

[Mark Sapiro]

James Reid wrote:
>
>One of the lists that I am getting ready to migrate to Mailman has had
>around 2,000 emails over the last couple of years.  I currently have these
>emails sitting in a folder on Outlook 2002.
>
> 
>
>I would like to move these emails to the Mailman archive for the new list.
>
> 
>
>Can someone give me some guidelines on how I can achieve this?



I am not familiar with how Outlook 2002 stores messages or exports
them, but what you need is a Unix mbox format file containing all the
messages each preceded by a "From_" line, i.e. a line that begins
exactly with the word From followed by a space, an e-mail address and
the date and time, e.g. like the following but not indented -

    From msapiro at value.net Thu Jan 22 17:54:22 2004

This line is followed immediately by the header lines of the message,
then an empty line and finally the body of the message. This sequence
is repeated for each message.

If this is a brand new list with no posts, just copy this file to
archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox and then run

   bin/arch --wipe listname

to build the archive.

If there are already posts in the archive, the
archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file will already exist
with messages in it. The simplest thing which will preserve the
existing message numbers is to append the mbox data from the Outlook
archives to the end of the existing
archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file and then run
bin/arch as above to rebuild the archive including the added messages.

Assuming the dates, senders, subjects, etc. are correct in the From_
line and From:, Date: and Subject: headers, everything will be built
correctly in the archive. If there are Message-Id: and In-Reply-To:
and/or References: headers in the mbox file, the archive will be
properly threaded too.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan