[Mailman-Users] Removing archived spam

[Mark Sapiro]

On 11/07/2017 10:41 AM, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> On 11/07/2017 01:29 AM, Hal via Mailman-Users wrote:
>> I run a low-volume mailing list (using Mailman 2.1.12) and I see that a
>> few spam-messages have gotten through, which also means they're archived.
>> I would like to remove them but all the info I can find when searching
>> online are along the lines of "hard to do", "shouldn't be attempted",
>> "impossible" and so on. Is this correct, or is there a solution?
> 
> man mmarch


Which is apparently some packager's version of Mailman's bin/arch


> I haven't done this in forever but IIRC the scary hard to do impossible
> part is editing the mbox file without messing it up, not exactly rocket
> science.


This method, editing the cumulative archive mbox and rebuilding the
archive is the "best" way, but it is not without caveats.

The FAQ at <https://wiki.list.org/x/4030681> describes this method and
it's caveats along with the method of just editing or removing the HTML
files.

Note that removing the HTML files leaves broken links in the various
index files. It is better to just edit out the "body".

However, whatever you do to the HTML doesn't affect the periodic
.txt(.gz) files unless you edit those too.

If you want to remove the Subject: headers from the index files, this is
possible to do properly with the script at
<https://www.msapiro.net/scripts/hdfix> (mirrored at
<https://fog.ccsf.edu/~msapiro/scripts/hdfix>, but the best way to
remove stuff from the archive without side effects is to edit the
message bodies and perhaps subjects in the cumulative archive mbox,
check the mbox with Mailman's bin/cleanarch and maybe
<https://www.msapiro.net/scripts/check_arch> (mirrored at
<http://fog.ccsf.edu/~msapiro/scripts/check_arch>), and then run
Mailman's bin/arch --wipe.

But read the FAQ at <https://wiki.list.org/x/4030681> in it's entirety
including all the notes and caveats.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan

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