[Mailman-Users] Thanks, and some archive questions now.

[Gail]

First, thanks very much for your prompt answers Mark!  the more I read and
hear about this system the more convinced I am this will be a great solution
for us.  You mentioned editing messages may be a bit cumbersome, but these
new questions of mine will give you an idea of my tolerance for pain and
cumbersomeness perhaps! <G>  its not my first choice of course, but after
some serious torture with software lately, nothing I can imagine would be
worse than what I've dealt with already!

Right now, our archives consist of about 2500 old digests stored on my
laptop, obviously not good!  we have earlier archives stored on a website,
but in a system we could no longer continue to update due to some tech
reasons that aren't really clear to me.  We've recently found a system to
use for these archives, but it requires that I manually post each one to
that system after running them through an editing system to disable
addresses etc so I've got a lot of work in front of me.  What occurs to me
is, that if we convert to Mailman, we'd then have three separate archive
systems, so, I'm wondering if there's a way to eliminate at least one of
those. 

Even if I had to manually post them to Mailman, I'd far rather do that
rather than save to this other system so at least they'd all be in one
place.  My question is, is it possible to somehow get old digests into the
system?  And if so, is there a way to write a script to do that in some
automated way?  

Also, would I get better, searchable archives out of somehow posting each of
the messages separately and letting the system create new digests?

And, if that's the case, could I do this update in a second list with only
one or two dummy members, then somehow merge these archives with the 'real'
list we'd be running concurrently while all these old messages were being
processed into the system as I'm describing?

I also wonder if some or all of this rather labor intensive work I'm talking
about could be handled by some sort of scripts?

I don't need to know HOW to do it now, it would go right over my head, but
I'm wondering if I should hold off updating this other system for now and
wait until we've converted, so really all I want to know is if these things
are somehow possible?

Thanks!
Gail