[Mailman-Users] List Migration Questions

[Mark Sapiro]

On 04/03/2016 05:28 AM, Richard Robbins wrote:
> I administer a mailman mailing list that is hosted by a web hosting company.
> 
> I am in the process of identifying a new service provider and want to
> migrate the mailing list and hope to move the archives.  The customer
> service people I have contacted do not seem to know much about mailman and
> I am concerned that they might not be able to get me the relevant mbox
> file.  The archived messages in monthly chunks are publicly available so I
> was hoping that there might be a way for me to access the mbox file without
> assistance from the hosting company.  In the alternative, what directions
> should I give the hosting company to locate the file.


You can get the mbox yourself. Even though your archives are public, you
can use a private archive url (with authentication) like
http://www.example.com/mailman/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox

For example, the following works for this list

wget -O mailman-users.mbox \
 http://mail.python.org/mailman/private/mailman-users.mbox/mailman-users.mbox?password=pppp\&username=uuuu@example.com\&submit=1

where uuuu at example.com is a list member and pppp is the member's list
password, or pppp can be the list admin password in which case the
\&username=uuuu at example.com is unnecessary.

Also, if you can get from the host Mailman's lists/LISTNAME/config.pck
file, you can just drop it into the new server and your list with its
membership will be there.


> If I can't get the mobx file is there any way to reconstruct it from the
> monthly gzip collections so that my old messages can be integrated smoothly
> into a list established with another hosting company?


You can gunzip and concatenate all the monthly gzips, but don't do it.
There are only limited headers in those files and you lose much
information that way, and there is no need as you can get the cumulative
mbox.

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