[Mailman-Users] Corret way of purging mail list archives

[Mark Sapiro]

Spyro Polymiadis wrote:
> 
> We "private" archive all our lists - and its come a time where we
> need to free space up on the volume that its archiving to.. My
> Question is, We've identified which lists we are able to purge
> archives from - and was just wondering whats the correct way to go
> about removing them from the system? We have about 10 lists that have
> approx1.5-3gig in their listname folder/associated .mbox file


The answer depends on whether you want to delete the entire archive or 
just some of it, and if just some, whether you want to preserve the URLs 
of the remaining messages.

If you want to delete the entire archive, or you don't care about 
preserving URLs, the easiest way is to edit the 
archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file to remove the messages 
you don't want and then run 'bin/arch --wipe listname' to remove the 
pipermail archive and rebuild it with only the messages (if any) 
remaining in the archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file.

If you want to clear the pipermail archive, but keep all the messages in 
the archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file, you can run 
'bin/arch --wipe listname /dev/null'.

If you just want to prune the pipermail archive, you can remove the 
periodic directories and .txt and .txt.gz files you don't want from 
archives/private/listname/, but this leaves broken links in the 
archives/private/listname/index.html file. You can edit them out, but 
they will return when the index is rebuilt.

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