[Mailman-Users] Deleting Mailman Mbox

[Mark Sapiro]

Carlos Williams wrote:

>I have no idea what happened to my mailman installation. As far as I
>can tell from a very basic administrative and user level, it works
>perfect with my Postifx install. Only only noticed this was a problem
>when I started to migrate my mailman data to a new email server I am
>building to replace this old hardware.
>
>When I go to /var/lib/mailman/archives/private - I then see the
>mailman.mbox directory. This directory repeats over and over:
>
>[root at mail mailman.mbox]# pwd
>/var/lib/mailman/archives/private/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox
>
>
>I have never seen anything like this and so far this is the only one I
>have seen so far with this problem. My only solution to fix it is to
>delete everything recursive from
>/var/lib/mailman/archives/mailman.mbox. I don't know if this is going
>to break anything or what. I notice in my other *.mbox directories,
>there is always a file that ends in *.mbox.


Someone else reported a similar symptom a month or two ago. (I just
tried to find this in the archive, and I see it was you, not someone
else.)

I have no idea how this happened. I suspect somehow instead of
mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox being a file, it somehow became a link back
to its parent. If this is the case, even "rm -rf
/var/lib/mailman/archives/mailman.mbox" may not succeed because it may
loop indefinitely, but it's worth a try.

At worst, you might be able to "mv
/var/lib/mailman/archives/mailman.mbox junk". Then you could create a
new /var/lib/mailman/archives/mailman.mbox directory and empty
/var/lib/mailman/archives/mailman.mbox/mailman.mbox file with the same
ownership and permissions as the good ones.


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