[Mailman-Users] converting an e-mail discussion to a list (with existing archive)

[Mark Sapiro]

On 2/2/14 10:14 PM, Marcel (Felix) Giannelia wrote:
> 
> 1. Make a new blank Mailman list
> 
> 
> 2. Set yourself as the admin and the only subscriber
> 
> 
> 3. Go into Mailman's Defaults.py and change these settings:
> ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY = 2
> ARCHIVER_ALLOWABLE_SANE_DATE_SKEW = days(15)
> 
> Very important! If you don't change those, the archive threading will be
> completely messed up. (this is the issue I was having... didn't figure
> out that this setting existed until after I'd imported a hundred
> e-mails... see below for how to fix it if you did that too.)
> 
> 
> 4. Turn off respond_to_post_requests on the Mailman general settings
> page for the list
> 
> Very important! If you don't turn this off, everyone may get lots of
> "your message has been held" e-mails.
> 
> 
> 5. Find an e-mail program that has a 'bounce' or 'redirect with full
> headers' command (e.g. alpine, claws-mail, ...) -- this will preserve
> who sent what, instead of it all coming from you
> 
> 
> 6. Start 'bounce'ing all messages related to the conversation to the
> new list's posting address
> 
> 
> 7. Verify that threading and attachments are being handled correctly in
> the archive
> 
> 
> 8. When you've finished creating the archive, subscribe everyone else
> to the list.


Steps 3. through 6. could be more easily accomplished by the following:

1) Gather all the emails into a single *nix mbox format file. Depending
on your email client, this may already exist as the folder containing
the desired messages.

2) copy that mbox file to
/path/to/mailman/archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox

3) run Mailman's
bin/arch --wipe listname

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