• David Doria daviddoria@gmail.com:

I am interested in counting the number of times a phrase has occurred on a mailing list in a given time period. For example, I want to know how many times the word "example" occurred from 2008 - 2009. Is it possible to do this?

You could analyse the archives for that. Usually, the archives are stored as an mbox. So use your favourite tools on that

• David Doria daviddoria@gmail.com:

Is it possible to download the entire archive as one file? I see that they are broken down into months: http://www.vtk.org/pipermail/vtkusers/

wget is your friend.

wget -r -l1 --no-parent-nd -A.txt.gz http://www.vtk.org/pipermail/vtkusers/ or something like that

• Ralf Hildebrandt Ralf.Hildebrandt@charite.de:

• David Doria daviddoria@gmail.com:

...

Is it possible to download the entire archive as one file? I see that they are broken down into months: http://www.vtk.org/pipermail/vtkusers/

wget is your friend.

wget -r -l1 --no-parent-nd -A.txt.gz http://www.vtk.org/pipermail/vtkusers/ or something like that

wget -r -l1 --no-parent -nd -A.txt.gz http://www.vtk.org/pipermail/vtkusers/ sorry.

Adam McGreggor wrote:

[...]

http://lists.example.org/mailman/private/example-list.mbox/example-list.mbox, perhaps?

(works for me).

Luckily that doesn't work here, I don't believe you should be able to directly download the mbox files like that.

Andrew.

Mark Sapiro wrote:

[...]

Andrew Hodgson wrote:

...

David Doria wrote:

...

Is it possible to download the entire archive as one file? I see that they are broken down into months: http://www.vtk.org/pipermail/vtkusers/

To get the .mbox file directly you will need to access the server and download the file as a privileged user. It may be quite large due to the >size of the archive.

You don't need shell/privileged access to the server to get the archive mbox. You just need to be a list member.

Authenticate for private archive access by going to a URL like http://www.vtk.org/mailman/private/vtkusers/ and logging in. Then get >http://www.vtk.org/mailman/private/vtkusers.mbox/vtkusers.mbox.

Ah, didn't realise that was possible, disregard my previous message on this subject. Authentication was the key point.

Andrew.

Adam McGreggor wrote:

[...]

...

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 04:02:51PM +0000, Andrew Hodgson wrote: I don't believe you should be able to directly download the mbox files like that.

Why ever not? What's so different about grabbing one mbox at once, rather than however many iterations/scraping?

The point that I didn't grasp was that you needed to log into the private archives before you could in fact do this. From your message I mistakenly thought that you could just directly grab the mbox without authentication.

Sorry about that. Andrew.