[Mailman-Users] Importing old archives into Mailman

[Barry S. Finkel]

On 5/10/2013 10:27 AM, Larry Kuenning wrote, in part:
> Fortunately my old archives were already in mbox format.  Or rather,
> almost in mbox format.  The old incarnation of my lists had been on a
> server where I had a low usage quota, so I had been downloading all
> archives over a year old and storing them on my home computer.  In doing
> so, I had passed them through a word processor macro to do some minimal
> cleanup, which was chiefly to remove the ">" that mbox files put in
> front of body lines beginning with "From " ("From the historian's
> viewpoint," one subscriber wrote).


The ">" in front of "From " in message bodies IS REQUIRED.
The separator for individual mail messages in an mbox file
is the "From ....." line that contains a data and maybe a sender
e-mail address.  Any other line that begins in column one with the 
five-character string "From " will be treated as a message separator.

Technically, any character in the first column before "From "
in the next five characters will work; the ">" character is the
one that was chosen a long time ago.

--Barry Finkel