[Mailman-Users] Moving archives (from L-Soft LISTSERV toMailman)

[Dewhirst, Rob]

> Once you have a .mbox file,

that's the hard part, really.  It took me days to find a script to do
this. Were I better at perl I could have probably done it myself, but I
am not.

I would strongly recommend performing this on a dummy list first, and
then renaming the "cleaned" mbox file to import into your real list. 

Here's a quick and dirty, but hopefully complete set of steps to convert
LISTSERV log archives to mailman mbox archives.

What you need:

 - the .logxx files for the list, probably located in
\LISTSERV\listname\ if you have access to the file system, otherwise you
can get them with a combination of INDEX and GET commands to the
LISTSERV processor.
 - the n2folder.pl script, which apparently shipped with some old
version of a PINE conversion package.  I think this is the same as a
script called "l2mail". I can't find where I got my clean, unwrapped
copy but would make a copy available on request.

1. Make the case of the .logxx filenames uniform. It may not be,
especially if the LISTSERV is on Windows. (e.g listname.log0404 and
LISTNAME.LOG0404)

2. cat the log files to listname.notebook

3. run the perl script on the notebook file: 

   perl n2folder.pl listname.notebook
 
* This script copies the resulting converted file to the mail folder of
the current user by default.
* be prepared for the script to barf on poorly formatted dates.  You may
need to edit the .notebook file and run the script repeatedly. 

4. copy and rename the notebook file from ~/mail/listname.notebook (or
wherever you put it) to listname.dirty.mbox (or whatever to indicate
it's not cleaned up)

5. /usr/local/mailman/bin/cleanarch < listname.dirty.mbox >
listname.new.mbox

6. stop mailman 

7. rename the currently active mailman list mbox if there is one in
/listname.mbox/listname.mbox/

8. cat listname.new.mbox listname.mbox.renamed > listname.mbox

9. bin/arch --wipe listname

10. check the web archives to make sure they are ok.

11. Go back and clean up dates in bad messages, or clean up
misinterpreted forwarded messages that were treated as sent messages.  A
single missing From line can screw up several messages.

12. lather, rinse, repeat #9-11

13. start mailman