[Mailman-Users] Question about restoring a mailman list or two

[Maish Saidel-Keesing]

Thank you mark for your reply.

I gather that I need shell access for all of this.

I am not sure if I will be able to get it.

Is there no other way to do this????

Maish
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:msapiro at value.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 9:11 PM
To: Maish Saidel-Keesing; mailman-users at python.org
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Question about restoring a mailman list or two

Maish Saidel-Keesing wrote:

>Someone approached me and asked if I can help them restore two lists 
>that they have.
>
>The mailman package was installed through CPanel (I know I am going to 
>get a lot of answers to go to cpanel for support but I will ask it 
>anyway)
>
>In the tar package that was backed up on cpanel I have some of the 
>files that I think will be able to help me
>
>I just don't know how to put them back into the lists.
>
>What I have is the following:
>
>A directory called "mm" and within that directory are two more 
>directories for each of the lists For examples sakes we will call them 
>A & B In each of those directories I have 4 files
>
>Config.pck
>Config.pck.lst
>Pending.pck
>Request.pck
>
>In the config.pck file I see (with a lot of garbage - when I opened it 
>up in
>notepad) the email addresses and names of the subscribers to the list 
>(at least I think so).
>
>To restore it I was thinking of extracting the emails and then 
>recreating the list and mass subscribing them again.
>Is there a simpler way to do it??

Yes.

Assume $prefix is the path to the current Mailman installation.

Just restore the "A" and "B" directories with their files to the directory
$prefix/lists/

If the backups were created under the same mailman version, that should be
it, but see  $prefix/bin/check_perms --help and  $prefix/bin/update --help
in case you might need them.

>Second thing is the archives...
>
>I have a folder called "mma" from the cpanel backup that has the 
>archives saved nicely in html format. How am I supposed to retrieve 
>that back into the list current archives?

The archives for a list go into the $prefix/archives/private/list-name/
directory. If the archives are public there is also a symlink from
$prefix/archives/public/list-name to $prefix/archives/private/list-name

There is a global .mbox file in
$prefix/archives/private/list-name.mbox/list-name.mbox

If you have that, you can rebuild the archive without the other stuff.
See:
 $prefix/bin/arch --help

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan