[Mailman-Users] externally stored attachments and bin/arch

[giannis karageorgiou]

dear user support people,

I am managing some lists where all attachments are scrubbed and
stored externally 
(i.e the mailbox-format file contains only references).
 
yesterday I appended an older archive from the previous hosting
system to a current mailbox, run arch (with purge opt) and noticed 
that the attachments subdir in the pipermail dir was erased, so
all external files were lost! Is this the normal behavior? is there
a way to save the non-mailbox-stored files elsewhere to avoid
loosing them?

moreover, now that I looked into it, I got the impression that
older attachments are also purged from the other lists too. 
Is it  really so (possibly as side effect of the monthly 
pipermail re-indexing) ?

thanks beforehand for any insight
(and in general for your work)

GK