[Mailman-Users] fixing a "reordered" archive

[Matthew Needham]

A couple of weeks ago I moved all of my mailing lists to a new subdomain. So far, everything has worked great, but I've now discovered that the archive message numbering has changed. For example, I'm referring to the numbers "006782" at the end of a URL like http://lists.hdfgroup.org/pipermail/hdf-forum_lists.hdfgroup.org/2013-May/006782.html.

I believe that this happened because after the list was first created in mailman (in 2009), older archives were added using "arch <listname> <older.mbox>. My hypothesis is that if I were able to separate the current mbox into the messages that existed before older.mbox was archived, and those that were added afterwards, I could then rebuild the archive in the original order so that the message numbering would be preserved.

As best as I can tell, there's no way for me to determine which messages were in the archive before older.mbox was added. Is there a way? 

Alternatively, is these a better way to preserve all of the links that are now sitting in Google, various third party archives, sundry word documents, and user mailboxes?

Or is this a fool's errand I should abandon posthaste?

In case it helps, before migrating the lists I made tarballs of everything, so I still have access to the archives before they were rebuilt.


Thanks.

-- 

Matthew Needham

The HDF Group
1800 South Oak Street, Suite 203
Champaign, IL 61820
 
217-531-6110
mneedham at hdfgroup.org