[Mailman-Users] site administration question

[Mark Sapiro]

Larry Johnson wrote:
>
>Now I have one other related question.  The archives directories have
>the mbox file of the form:
>
>mailman/archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox
>
>This file seems to grow indefinitely, and is paralleled by the various
>*.txt files broken down by month.  We'd like to remove messages older
>than a certain date.  Reading the Site Administrator Documentation the
>best I can infer is that the way to do this would be edit the *mbox file
>and run arch to rebuild the html archives.  Is this true?  Will "arch"
>remove the *.txt files corresponding to the deleted messages from the
>*mbox? 


It will if you use the --wipe option.

However, if you delete messages from the global .mbox file and rebuild
with 'bin/arch --wipe', all the archive messages will be renumbered
which will invalidate any saved URLs (or archived URLs) pointing to
archived messages.

E.g. suppose there is a message in the archive that says "see my prior
post at
<http://example.com/pipermail/listname/2006-August/999999.html>".
After rebuilding, even if the post is still in the archive, its number
will be different so the URL will either be invalid or will retrieve
the wrong message.

This may or may not be a concern for you.

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