Gail wrote:
My question is, is it possible to somehow get old digests into the system? And if so, is there a way to write a script to do that in some automated way?
It is trivially easy to import messages into a Mailman archive with the bin/arch command line tool IF and ONLY IF the messages are in unix mbox format - i.e., a flat file with each message preceded by a line of the form
From sender@example.com Mon Mar 13 17:01:06 2006
followed immediately by the message headers, a blank line, the message body and a blank line.
If the messages aren't in mbox format to begin with, they need somehoy to be put in that format. There is some info at <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.036.htp> that may be helpful.
Also, would I get better, searchable archives out of somehow posting each of the messages separately and letting the system create new digests?
What do you have in your existing digests?
Mailman's pipermail archives are indexed by month (by default) and each month has indices by date, subject, author and thread. The thread index depends on messages having a Message-Id: header and replies having a References: or a In-Reply-To: header. If you don't have this information in the mbox file, the thread index will be the same as the date index.
You still want individual messages rather than digests because otherwise, the archive indices will be full of messages with subject "... digest issue # ...".
Also, Mailman archives are not searchable within Mailman. There are patches for this, and if the archives are public, they can be searched with google if google indexes them. Go to <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py> and search for archive. Some of the returned articles are relevant.
And, if that's the case, could I do this update in a second list with only one or two dummy members, then somehow merge these archives with the 'real' list we'd be running concurrently while all these old messages were being processed into the system as I'm describing?
If you need to create archives by posting messages one at a time, then yes, you can do it on a list with no members, and the archiving process will build the mbox file which can later be put together with the one for the live list. See <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.003.htp> which discusses removing posts from the archive, but the same information applies to adding to an archive.
Basically, you just put the two mbox files together onto one and rebuild the archive. There are some issues with message numbering which are discussed in the FAQ, but they shouldn't be to significant with a fairly new archive.
I also wonder if some or all of this rather labor intensive work I'm talking about could be handled by some sort of scripts?
Again, depending on what information you have, you can script the creation of a mbox file, and you can script a list posting process too, but this shouldn't be necessary because posting a message to a list is not going to add anything that couldn't be programmatically added to create a mbox file.
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan