Hi All--
Mark Sapiro wrote:
So, if I process the old mbox and convert the "From " lines without dates into "From " lines without " and <> and add a date/time stamp, and THEN run cleanarch, cleanarch should escape only the 1006 non-matching "From " lines, and I should end up with an mbox I can combine with March, April and May of 2007 from the current list. Is that a correct assessment?
That is correct, but if you can process the old mbox and identify which "From " lines without dates are actually message separators, then you should be able to identify which ones are not message separators and just escape those. I.e. create your own archive cleaner specific to this situation.
Which is exactly what I did. I ran cleanarch on the result, and it found four instances of bad email addresses, as in "foo bar"@spam.org (the " were part of the address), but luckily, those four instances were forwarded messages, and did indeed need to be escaped.
OK. Now I have a large inbox to re-process (110 MB), but before I do that, I have to remove all the previously processed messages from the current archive. The FAQ ("3.3. How can I remove a post from the list archive / remove an entire archive?") says to "edit the raw archive".
Editing 122 MB of raw archive is going to take some time, since I have to throw away 110 MB of it. I'd like to prevent new messages from coming into the system while I'm editing it, and I seem to be overlooking instructions on how to lock the list. I find that the help message for withlist tells me how to lock the list while I operate on it using withlist, but is that what I want? Can I vi/emacs the mbox while it is locked with withlist?
Am I simply obtuse, or is there no way to lock the list while I'm editing? Or do I throw caution to the winds and blithely edit without concern for incoming messages?
Thanks for all your help, and patience.
Metta, Ivan