[Mailman-Users] "No subject" messages in archives

[Ivan Van Laningham]

Hi All--
I have managed to recover and restore all the archives, covering eight 
or nine years, for all my mailing lists, following the excellent advice 
and pointers given by members of this list.

But I have one list for which I used archives from two previous 
incarnations of the list, plus the current archive mbox, as input to 
arch.  I made sure that the previous archives were in mbox format and 
that they contained only one "From " line per message.  Once I was 
convinced they were all ready, I combined the old archive mbox with the 
current archive mbox using cat, and ran arch.

It worked perfectly, creating archive pages going all the way back to 
1999, except that in the archive page for the month in which I ran arch 
(May) for the day on which I ran it (May 7), I have in the vicinity of 
5000 entries for messages with "No subject" and no body.  The index page 
for May looks like this:

# [Guppies] Malice 2008   Suzanne Williams
# No subject
# No subject
# No subject
... 5000 entries
# No subject
# No subject
# [Guppies] harsh words for cheating   peg908 at aol.com
# [Guppies] harsh words for cheating   Vwright

I tried to find these mysterious entries in the current archive mbox, 
but they don't appear.  The _only_ thing I can see, in the current mbox, 
is that the end of the last message from the old archives ends on one 
line and the "From " line for the next message begins on the very next 
line, with no blank lines between, and everywhere else there are either 
one or more blank lines or one of those message separator lines from 
AOL: 
 >"----------MB_8C9379FAFA8ECEC_DAC_6C2A_WEBMAIL-MC05.sysops.aol.com--"<

These bogus entries aren't really hurting anything, I suppose, but they 
are annoying and it is irritating to have to scroll down 5000 lines to 
get to the next real message.

What is causing this?  And is there anything I can do to get rid of the 
problem?  I am willing to live with it if I have to, but I would prefer 
having a fix.

Thanks!

Metta,
Ivan
-- 
Ivan Van Laningham
God N Locomotive Works
http://www.pauahtun.org/
http://www.python.org/workshops/1998-11/proceedings/papers/laningham/laningham.html
Army Signal Corps:  Cu Chi, Class of '70
Author:  Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours