[Mailman-Users] How to reduce list archives

[Hans Joachim Wenzel]

Hi,

we "private" archive all our lists - and its come the time where we
need to free space up on the volume that its archiving to. We are using version 2.1.12.

We tried to edit the archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file to remove the messages we don't want and then run 'bin/arch --wipe listname' and got:

exim at mailhost-locust] /usr/local/mailman/bin $ ./arch --wipe security  
#00000 <20090102122338.D9D2A15804B at flens.dfn-cert.de>
Schreibe Archivzustand in Datei /HAmailhost/mailman/archives/private/security/pipermail.pck
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./arch", line 201, in ?
    main()
  File "./arch", line 189, in main
    archiver.processUnixMailbox(fp, start, end)
  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line 578, in processUnixMailbox
    a = self._makeArticle(m, self.sequence)
  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py", line 684, in _makeArticle
    mlist=self.maillist)
  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py", line 308, in __init__
    charset = message.get_content_charset(cset_out)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/email/Message.py", line 800, in get_content_charset
    charset = unicode(charset, 'us-ascii').encode('us-ascii')
TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported

The archive was completely lost and restored from backup. Any help would be appropriate.
Thanks.