[Mailman-Users] Archives disk space: are .txt files needed?

[Mike Alberghini]

I'm doing the admin of a Mailman server with 280+ lists and I'm fighting
with archive sizes.  Mailman is on a 5 gig partition, and 4 gigs of that
is taken up by ~mailman/archives.

In some cases the archives are big because the list gets dozens of posts a day.
In other cases, people use them to send 15meg attachments, which also get 
archived.

The archive directories contain each months mail in three formats:

1.  a plaintext file:  2004-November.txt
2.  a gzipped file:    2004-November.txt.gz
3.  a directory:       2004-November - contains individual HTML messages.

The web archive uses the files in the directory, and links to the gzipped
file.  Does anything use the plaintext file?  It seems like it's wasting a
ton of diskspace having the same file gzipped and unzipped in the same space.

So, first off, can I delete the year-month.txt files without causing harm?
Second, once the current month is over, can I prevent the non-zipped files
from ever existing?  Finally, is there a way to prevent the archiving of
attachments?

Any other suggestions on how to control or limit the diskspace the archives use
would be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Michael Alberghini
Software Systems Engineer
Georgia State University
mike at gsu.edu