On 7/18/07, alpesh gajbe wrote:

I am not sure whether this mail belongs to the users or developers list so I am sending to both. Apologies.

This sounds to me more like a question for -users.

I have a large 1.2 GB mbox file which i need to archive, the messages in mbox typically have jpeg image attachments whose approximate image sizes is 4 KB.

4KB JPEGs? That's pretty small for a JPEG. You have over 300,000 of these messages per mailbox file?

when i run arch script in /usr/lib/mailman/bin/ on my ubuntu 7.04 I get the following error

*File "/usr/lib/python2.5/os.py", line 172, in makedirs mkdir(name, mode) OSError: [Errno 31] Too many links:

That sounds like a directory problem, and not a file problem. With as large a mailbox file as you're talking about, and as many messages as you're talking about, you probably need to break your archives more frequently than once a month. Try breaking them weekly instead. Alternatively, try changing your underlying filesystem to one that supports large numbers of files in a single directory, and preferably does so with an internal hashed directory/inode structure (e.g., XFS).

Also keep in mind that you'll want to make sure that your OS is built to support large files (files over 2GB). Many Linux distributions are not built out-of-the-box to support large files.

Finally, the version of Python that is recommended for use with the latest release version of Mailman, is Python 2.4.x for Mailman 2.1.9, for whatever the most recent version of Python 2.4.x (currently 2.4.3, I believe). More recent versions of Python may or may not work with Mailman 2.1.9, and almost certainly will not work correctly with earlier versions of Mailman.

*My basic objective is to archive 250GB of mails every month for two years . The size of which would exceed 7 Tera Bytes approx. Would this be a feasible option using mailman.(out of curiosity !!)

That should be possible. We have 4GB worth of archives for python-list@python.org going back to 1999, and I'm pretty sure those messages are text-only or text+code fragments.

What has been the largest mail archive volume anyone has ever deployed into mailman ? (out of curiosity !!)

We've got some information in the FAQ Wizard about large mailing lists servers with regards to numbers of subscribers or numbers of messages, but I don't know that anyone has tried to gather any specific information with regards to large sizes of archives.

The largest archives I am personally aware of are the ones we have for python-list, but I'd love to hear any information that anyone else has about any others.

-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>

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