[Mailman-Users] importing archived Maildir email lists into Mailman lists archives

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

[IDIS Technical Secretariat] Ricardo Rodríguez writes:
 > Thanks Mark, all,
 > 
 > On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 4:09 AM, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:
 > 
 > > On 08/28/2015 12:52 AM, [IDIS Technical Secretariat] Ricardo Rodríguez
 > > wrote:
 > > >
 > > > I have a number of Maildir format mailing lists archives

No, you don't have Maildir, at least not "Maildir" as most of the
Internet understands it.  Here's what Dan Bernstein (the inventor or
at least popularizer of Maildir) says:

    Can a maildir contain more than tmp, new, cur?

    Yes:
    .qmail: used to do direct deliveries with qmail-local.
    bulletintime: empty file, used by system-wide bulletin programs.
    bulletinlock: empty file, used by system-wide bulletin programs.
    seriallock: empty file, used to serialize AutoTURN.

 > Ricardo-Rodriguezs-Mac-Pro:r.users rrodriguez$ ls
 > Log bounce digissue headerremove lock mod outlocal remote

"Lock" -- no, this isn't Maildir.  The whole point of Maildir is that
you don't need locks because reading and writing are done in different
directories, and changes happen atomically.  (This can even work with
editing.)

 > allow bouncer dignum indexed lockbounce modsub owner subscribers
 > archive config editor inlocal mailinglist num prefix text
 > archived digest headeradd key manager outhost public tstdig
 > 
 > Within /archive, there are two folders, 0 and 1, with a number of files,
 > each of them containing one message, and an index file.
 > 
 > Please, does this made sense for you?

I don't recall anything like that.  Please try to find an explanation
of the structure in the system documentation, or ask the vendor.
However, since you think they're "Maildir", probably what is meant is
that they have a structure that is one message per file rather than
many messages per file.  You probably just need to figure out how to
get the order of messages right, then concatenate the messages.

Most likely, all you need for each list are the archive folders and
the single messages, and maybe the index file will be of some use
depending on what it contains.  If your documentation and/or the old
vendor are of no help, see if you can find a whole message file you
can send to us *as a file attachment* -- we want to see what headers
are included (it probably doesn't really matter, though, except for
the "Unix From_" which they probably don't have).  If for privacy
reasons you don't want to broadcast any message on a public mailing
list, you can send it to Mark and me personally.  Also it may be
helpful to figure out the rule for the folders whose names are
numbers: are they the leading digits where files are named 000 to 999?
Are they months?  Years?  etc.

 > Am I completely lost?

No, of course not.  Just don't delete anything until you're sure the
new system is working.  I did qualify everything with "probably", it
may take a couple of guesses to get it right. :-)