I'm in the process of migrating from another list server, Mercury by David Harris. One of the important things in the old mailing list is the archives. So, I'd like to convert them or migrate them. The existing archives are flat text files, not even mime. There are delimiters at the end of each message that seem to be pretty unambiguous.

Has anyone imported archives from another list server into Mailman? If so, do you have any advice or guidance?

Thanks, Mike

I hesitate to mention it, but there is an old utility called "digest_arch" that was used for moving flat files into email syntax. Here are the notes from the script:

NOTE: This is being deprecated since mailman has been shifted over to an external archiver (ie, andrew kuchling's latest version of pipermail.)

This program shouldn't be attempted by people who don't understand Python. I wrote it to build archives for a few lists I'd been running for a long time under majordomo.

Convert majordomo digests all stored in one directory into mailbox format. Note that the digests correct order in the dir should be alphabetical order.

The output file is ARCHIVE.ME in the same directory the digests are in. Run this program before you transfer the majordomo list.

To get the output file archived, create the list under mailman, run this script, and then do the following:

cat ARCHIVE.ME >> ~mailman/mailman/lists/mylist/archived.mail

You also need to adjust the variable: NUM_LINES_TO_STRIP_FROM_TOP (currently it's set to 11).

Good Luck - Jon Carnes