Hi All-- I have managed to recover and restore all the archives, covering eight or nine years, for all my mailing lists, following the excellent advice and pointers given by members of this list.
But I have one list for which I used archives from two previous incarnations of the list, plus the current archive mbox, as input to arch. I made sure that the previous archives were in mbox format and that they contained only one "From " line per message. Once I was convinced they were all ready, I combined the old archive mbox with the current archive mbox using cat, and ran arch.
It worked perfectly, creating archive pages going all the way back to 1999, except that in the archive page for the month in which I ran arch (May) for the day on which I ran it (May 7), I have in the vicinity of 5000 entries for messages with "No subject" and no body. The index page for May looks like this:
# [Guppies] Malice 2008 Suzanne Williams # No subject # No subject # No subject ... 5000 entries # No subject # No subject # [Guppies] harsh words for cheating peg908 at aol.com # [Guppies] harsh words for cheating Vwright
I tried to find these mysterious entries in the current archive mbox, but they don't appear. The _only_ thing I can see, in the current mbox, is that the end of the last message from the old archives ends on one line and the "From " line for the next message begins on the very next line, with no blank lines between, and everywhere else there are either one or more blank lines or one of those message separator lines from AOL:
"----------MB_8C9379FAFA8ECEC_DAC_6C2A_WEBMAIL-MC05.sysops.aol.com--"<
These bogus entries aren't really hurting anything, I suppose, but they are annoying and it is irritating to have to scroll down 5000 lines to get to the next real message.
What is causing this? And is there anything I can do to get rid of the problem? I am willing to live with it if I have to, but I would prefer having a fix.
Thanks!
Metta, Ivan
Ivan Van Laningham God N Locomotive Works http://www.pauahtun.org/ http://www.python.org/workshops/1998-11/proceedings/papers/laningham/laningh... Army Signal Corps: Cu Chi, Class of '70 Author: Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours