[Mailman-Users] Exporting archives to a text file

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 12:31 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:
> Patricia A Moss wrote:
>>
>>I would like to move the very old archives off of the server and
>>into a text file, or perhaps a pdf, to clear space on my server.
>
> There already is a plain text mbox format archive at
> archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox that contains the entire
> list archive.

I forget, have headers been cleaned out?  Patricia might want to nuke
all the "Received" headers from the "very old" mbox file, for example,
which would save considerable space.  This would require splitting the
current mbox file and rebuilding the archives (thus changing message
sequence numbers and URLs).

> I don't know how any of this will impact namazu. Of course any search
> engine could find older messages in the LISTNAME.mbox file, but you
> already know all messages are there.

I think Namazu can probably be configured to look in the mbox file,
and this would be worth doing.  The search instructions should remark
that the mbox file is a last resort (since if you just keep the
original mbox as you suggest, it will hit every time if anything
hits!)

> The users could just visit the
> file in their browsers and use their browser search capabilities to
> find what they're looking for.

Yes, they would have to do that, but they might prefer to investigate
other, more precise, hits first, as well as being informed that "that
key doesn't exist AFAIK" on a failed search.