I administer a mailman mailing list that is hosted by a web hosting company.
I am in the process of identifying a new service provider and want to migrate the mailing list and hope to move the archives. The customer service people I have contacted do not seem to know much about mailman and I am concerned that they might not be able to get me the relevant mbox file. The archived messages in monthly chunks are publicly available so I was hoping that there might be a way for me to access the mbox file without assistance from the hosting company. In the alternative, what directions should I give the hosting company to locate the file.
If I can't get the mobx file is there any way to reconstruct it from the monthly gzip collections so that my old messages can be integrated smoothly into a list established with another hosting company?
Thanks for your guidance.
-- Rich
On 04/03/2016 05:28 AM, Richard Robbins wrote:
I administer a mailman mailing list that is hosted by a web hosting company.
I am in the process of identifying a new service provider and want to migrate the mailing list and hope to move the archives. The customer service people I have contacted do not seem to know much about mailman and I am concerned that they might not be able to get me the relevant mbox file. The archived messages in monthly chunks are publicly available so I was hoping that there might be a way for me to access the mbox file without assistance from the hosting company. In the alternative, what directions should I give the hosting company to locate the file.
You can get the mbox yourself. Even though your archives are public, you can use a private archive url (with authentication) like http://www.example.com/mailman/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox
For example, the following works for this list
wget -O mailman-users.mbox
http://mail.python.org/mailman/private/mailman-users.mbox/mailman-users.mbox?password=pppp\&username=uuuu@example.com\&submit=1
where uuuu@example.com is a list member and pppp is the member's list password, or pppp can be the list admin password in which case the \&username=uuuu@example.com is unnecessary.
Also, if you can get from the host Mailman's lists/LISTNAME/config.pck file, you can just drop it into the new server and your list with its membership will be there.
If I can't get the mobx file is there any way to reconstruct it from the monthly gzip collections so that my old messages can be integrated smoothly into a list established with another hosting company?
You can gunzip and concatenate all the monthly gzips, but don't do it. There are only limited headers in those files and you lose much information that way, and there is no need as you can get the cumulative mbox.
-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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Mark Sapiro
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Richard Robbins