I've read the FAQ on rebuilding archives, but there is a bit of "background" info I'm missing. Perhaps someone can fill in the missing knowledge for me?

Mailman 2.1.2 on FreeBSD 4.8 Release

My archives are kinda messy in that it was originally done with some other archive program, but I do have all the mailbox files from then. In addition, somehow there was a chunk of messages that never made it to the archives, and one of my users has submitted mailbox files for that chunk. In addition, there are a few messages I need to remove from the archives where someone posted private info by mistake.

I read the faq and have the mechanics of how to remove the ~/private/listname, then edit, then run ~/bin/arch listname BUT...

1. Someone did some work on this mailman system ages ago before me. In the ~/archives/private/listname.mbox directory, there are TWO files, not one. The first one is listname.mbox and the second one is listname.mbox.1 So my first question is, did the mbox get split into mbox and mbox.1 by the mailman softare? If so, I am guessing that the arch program will get both files and generate one archive. If mailman didn't do it, and the previous admin split the files for some reason, do I need to run arch on each file for the same list or join them first?

2. Since I will be regenerating the archives, in addition to the above files I will also have the mbox file that one of my users gave me that contains the missing sections of the archives. As a result, between all these mbox files, it is likely that the date ranges would be out of sequence. Is the mailman archive program smart enough that mbox files containing messages out of date order is ok? Ie., that it will read the dates in the messages and not assume that the next message is "after" the current message when it is processing it?

3. And as you might guess, it is very likely that among all the mailbox files I have to process to generate a new archive, there is very likely duplicate posts. Do I have to go through and clean this up manually? If so, are there any handy utilities around for processing multiple mailboxes into one mailbox file, putting them in date order at the least, and with any luck, removing duplicates?

Thanks for any pointers on this!!!

Jay West

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