[Mailman-Users] Question about g-zipped mail archives -attachment folders/files?

[Mark Sapiro]

Dave Yeats wrote:

>I'm looking at messages posted to a mailman-driven open-source
>development email list (on mail.gnome.org/archives), and I've
>downloaded the g-zip archives I want.  When I extract the files, I get
>one .txt file, and one or more "attachment" folders (with the suffix
>.txt.attachment00, .txt.attachment01, etc.) which, in turn, contain
>additional "attachment" files (with suffixes
>.txt.attachment00.attachment00,
>.txt.attachment00.attachment01, etc.).


This is not standard mailman. In the distributed mailman, the monthly
.gz files if any are just gzipped versions of the .txt files which in
turn just contain flattened versions of the messages in the pipermail
HTML archive.

These messages also may contain plain text of the form


-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: xxxx.txt
Url:
http://www.example.com/pipermail/list1/attachments/20060102/f04f72ba/attachment.txt

-------------- next part --------------

but they don't contain the contents of that attachment.txt file.


>I don't think these are attachments in the usual sense of "attachment"
>in email programs.  I don't think other file attachments are allowed
>on this list.
>
>It looks like the the first .txt document (at the root) contains all
>of the messages, but I was hoping someone could verify that for me.


I looked at a couple of archives on mail.gnome.org and the ones I
looked at only have one file in the yyyy-mmmm.txt.gz archive named
yyyy-mmmmm.txt.attachment00 which appears to be just the normal
yyyy-mmmmm.txt file except that the headers of the first message were
missing and way more headers were 'kept' - perhaps all of them.

Also, a .gz (gzipped) file does not contain a hierarchy of folders and
files unless it is a gzip of a .tar or other archive. Where are these
coming from in your case?

This looks like some mail.gnome.org specific way of dealing with the
plain text archive.

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