[Mailman-Users] "No subject" messages in archives

[Ivan Van Laningham]

Hi All--

Mark Sapiro wrote:
>
>> So, if I process the old mbox and convert the "From " lines without 
>> dates into "From " lines without " and <> and add a date/time stamp, and 
>> THEN run cleanarch, cleanarch should escape only the 1006 non-matching 
>> "From " lines, and I should end up with an mbox I can combine with 
>> March, April and May of 2007 from the current list.  Is that a correct 
>> assessment?
> 
> 
> That is correct, but if you can process the old mbox and identify which
> "From " lines without dates are actually message separators, then you
> should be able to identify which ones are not message separators and
> just escape those. I.e. create your own archive cleaner specific to
> this situation.
> 

Which is exactly what I did.  I ran cleanarch on the result, and it 
found four instances of bad email addresses, as in "foo bar"@spam.org 
(the " were part of the address), but luckily, those four instances were 
forwarded messages, and did indeed need to be escaped.

OK.  Now I have a large inbox to re-process (110 MB), but before I do 
that, I have to remove all the previously processed messages from the 
current archive.  The FAQ ("3.3. How can I remove a post from the list 
archive / remove an entire archive?") says to "edit the raw archive".

Editing 122 MB of raw archive is going to take some time, since I have 
to throw away 110 MB of it.  I'd like to prevent new messages from 
coming into the system while I'm editing it, and I seem to be 
overlooking instructions on how to lock the list.  I find that the help 
message for withlist tells me how to lock the list while I operate on it 
using withlist, but is that what I want?  Can I vi/emacs the mbox while 
it is locked with withlist?

Am I simply obtuse, or is there no way to lock the list while I'm 
editing?  Or do I throw caution to the winds and blithely edit without 
concern for incoming messages?

Thanks for all your help, and patience.

Metta,
Ivan
-- 
Ivan Van Laningham
God N Locomotive Works
http://www.pauahtun.org/
http://www.python.org/workshops/1998-11/proceedings/papers/laningham/laningham.html
Army Signal Corps:  Cu Chi, Class of '70
Author:  Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours