Hi All-- I wrote:

Ah, thanks, Barry. I will try one of these methods, probably the withlist one, and report back later today. If all goes well, I'll be able to update two FAQ entries, the one about removing archive entries and the one about importing messages/archives into your mailing list.

I locked the list with withlist. I then edited the .mbox file with vim and deleted 2662737 lines, all the messages that had malformed 'From ' lines (no dates at the end of the lines). On my somewhat slow machine (2.2GHZ Celeron), with only a gig of memory, this took about 10 minutes. I was willing to wait. ;-)

After saving modified .mbox, I exited withlist without saving. I then catted the corrected old archive .mbox file to the end of the modified .mbox. Then I ran arch. That, too, took a while, maybe half-an-hour for about 49,000 messages. Again, I was willing to wait. ;-)

Once it finished, I went to the latest, May 2007, archive index page. Here is the top of that page:

...

...

May 2007 Archives by date

 * Messages sorted by: [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
 * More info on this list...

Starting: Tue May 1 04:17:11 MDT 2007 Ending: Fri May 25 09:53:46 MDT 2007 Messages: 928 <<<

"Messages: 928" is a WHOLE LOT better than "Messages: 5928". ;-)

I couldn't be more pleased. I'm chuffed! Thanks to everyone. I'll be updating the FAQ entries concerned later today, I hope. Or would it be better to post the corrected entries here first in order to get input on them upfront?

I looked at the remainder of the archives, and I found only two oddities, both on the same page. Here is the relevant section of the index page:

# Peter Abresch Ellen Stanton # No subject Judith Miller # Marilyn Kapp # Happy: Up, down, up, down... Jmacampora at aol.com # Guppy Digest Jmacampora at aol.com # Jmacampora at aol.com # Guppies/Janet A. Lanier Dodson

The "Marilyn Kapp" and the third "Jmacampora at aol.com" entries have no subjects and no links to them. The previous entries are missing the "Next message" links, and the following entries are missing the "Previous message" links.

I'm actually willing to live with these, unless they're damaging the archives somehow. Any guesses as to how difficult it would be to fix these by say, simply editing the .mbox and re-running arch --wipe?

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