[Mailman-Users] site administration question

[Larry Johnson]

I'm a solaris/linux sysadmin who's recently taken over the site
administration of a mailman system after the departure of the guy who
set the system up.  We're currently running an older version of mailman 
(2.1.4) but we're in the process of upgrading to 2.1.8 and migrating to
a more substantial machine.

In the meantime we're having serious space issues with the current
machine, and I have a question about the way the messages are stored
here.  In the archive directories under the list name messages seem to
be stored in three places, all by month.  For example we have
2005-October (the directory with the individual messages as html)
2005-October.txt (a complete mbox for the month), and the same file
gzipped up.

First question -- do we really need the zipped up copy, while the
unzipped version is in the directory?  Are there any local settings we
can do to optimize space until we've moved to the new machine?

Larry