[Mailman-Users] Migrating content to a new list

Mark Sapiro mark at msapiro.net
Sat Jul 16 00:41:41 CEST 2011


On 7/15/2011 1:48 PM, Rob wrote:
> 
> We have just created a new list in Mailman 2.1.14 to handle a
> specific set of discussions that were previously taking place on
> another list hosted on the same server. The membership of the new
> list is much broader than the old list, so many of its members have
> had no exposure to the recent discussions. Is there a way that I can
> use the archives of 'oldlist' and send out the past month's worth of
> discussions to 'newlist' so that the members are all up to date on
> the recent conversations?
> 
> It's not feasible to just make the archives public because not all of
> the content is pertinent to all the members of 'newlist'.


I think there are two ways to handle this. Both involve making a copy of
archives/private/oldlist.mbox/oldlist.mbox and editing it (or perhaps
opening it with mutt or similar) and deleting those messages you don't
want available on newlist. So you end up with a mailbox with only those
posts you want available to newlist.

Then, if there haven't yet been any posts to newlist, just save that
mailbox as archives/private/newlist.mbox/newlist.mbox making sure it's
group is the mailman group, and run 'bin/arch --wipe newlist' to seed
the newlist archive with the old posts. Or, if there have been posts to
newlist, combine the mailbox with
archives/private/newlist.mbox/newlist.mbox and run 'bin/arch --wipe
newlist' to add those posts to the newlist archive.

If you want the newlist members to receive the posts by email, you can
instead remail (bounce in mutt terms) the messages in the mailbox to
newlist which will send them to the members and archive them. Before
doing that, you might want to set oldlist in Privacy options... ->
Recipient filters -> acceptable_aliases of newlist so the bounced posts
won't be held.

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



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