[Mailman-Users] Removing archived spam

[Hal]

On 07/11/17 19:41, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> On 11/07/2017 01:29 AM, Hal via Mailman-Users wrote:
>> I run a low-volume mailing list (using Mailman 2.1.12) and I see that a
>> few spam-messages have gotten through, which also means they're archived.
>> I would like to remove them but all the info I can find when searching
>> online are along the lines of "hard to do", "shouldn't be attempted",
>> "impossible" and so on. Is this correct, or is there a solution?
> 
> man mmarch
> 
> I haven't done this in forever but IIRC the scary hard to do impossible
> part is editing the mbox file without messing it up, not exactly rocket
> science.

So you're saying it's *NOT* hard to do?
I looked up "mmarch" and came up with this page which really didn't make 
me much wiser: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man8/mmarch.8.html

I also tried to log into the server and believe they're located 
somewhere here: /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/

unfortunately I'm unable to access that location ("permission denied") 
for some reason, so I'm contacting the server owner about that. But 
several years ago I did a lot of work cleaning up and importing archived 
messages from before I moved over to Mailman and made backups of said 
directory and it seems I have two main directories:

/var/lib/mailman/archives_BACKUP/private/LISTNAME/
and
/var/lib/mailman/archives_BACKUP/private/LISTNAME.mbox/

The "LISTNAME.mbox/" directory contains a single "LISTNAME.mbox" file 
while the "LISTNAME/" directory contains a variety of files and 
sub-directories by month. I suppose I have to clean things up in both of 
those paths?
In the former, if a certain month only contains spam message (i.e. no 
legit postings at all), can I just delete the following for instance and 
be done with it?

rm -riv 2017-October/
rm -iv 2017-October.txt
rm -iv 2017-October.txt.gz

That would still leave spam in the "mbox" file, but at least when 
browsing through the archives via the web interface they wouldn't see 
any spam there.


Hal