[Mailman-Users] Removing archived spam

[Dimitri Maziuk]

On 2017-11-11 17:19, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> On 11/11/2017 02:28 PM, Hal via Mailman-Users wrote:
...
>> The "LISTNAME.mbox/" directory contains a single "LISTNAME.mbox" file
>> while the "LISTNAME/" directory contains a variety of files and
>> sub-directories by month. I suppose I have to clean things up in both of
>> those paths?

The latter is auto-generated from the former by the (bin/|mm)arch.

> That depends. The easiest way to do it completely and correctly is to
> edit the LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox file and replace the spam bodies
> with "spam removed" or some such text and similarly for the Subject:
> headers, but leave the edited messages there so messages aren't
> renumbered when you do the next step.

Note that this only really matters if you think/know people have 
hyperlinks to archived messages *and* you care about not breaking those 
links. E.g. this link would be broken if the messages get renumbered:

> You might review this entire thread beginning at
> <https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2017-November/082712.html>
...

However if Mark said "you might review the entire thread titled 
'Removing archived spam' at 
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2017-November/thread.html" 
it wouldn't be a problem.

I think in terms of teh amount of work involved there is no much 
difference between deleting the entire message from .mbox file vs. 
deleting only the body and updating the subject. So you might as well do 
it right: Mark's way.

Dima