[wellylug] Mailing list admin: "handling" spam, archives

[Ewen McNeill]

Hi,

Firstly given all the discussion about how to handle our spam "problem"
not resulting in any clear decision for any approach (list-members only
posting, spam filtering and throw away "probably spam", do nothing and
see what happens), I've chosen "do nothing and see what happens" as it
requires the least amount of work on my part :-)

No doubt we'll revisit this next time we receive a spam message.  From
experience running other lists I suspect it's now merely a matter of
time before more turn up -- and I'd certainly prefer to do something
about it before it reaches the one-a-week sort of level (if only because
the discussion of the spam is itself fairly high volume).

Anyway, in the newly-made-available free time, I've imported the archive
of the old (Yahoo) Wellylug mailing list that someone sent me into the
mailing list archives at:

http://lists.naos.co.nz/pipermail/wellylug/

So we should now have a basically complete archive going back to June 2001
-- ie, there are around 2 years worth of messages in the archive now.

If anyone (worth a working email account[0]) has an older achive of the
old mailing list I'm willing to import too; contact me off list.

Finally for anyone interested, the approach for importing the archive
is basically:

- get one big mbox file containing _all_ the messages (ie the old ones,
  plus the new ones); the new ones are in
  /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox or similar

- stick that in place of the mbox archive (ie at:
  /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox
  or wherever you found the new messages archive)

- (re)move the individual message version of the archive from
  /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/LISTNAME
  so that the messages are all imported from scratch

- run the archive generation script:
  /var/lib/mailman/bin/arch LISTNAME \ 
       /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox

  (as one long line)

And wait a while -- it took about 5 minutes or so to reimport the 13MB 
of messages (about 3000 messages) and rebuild its index files and the
like.

This is based on the instructions at:

http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq05.001.htp

from the Mailman FAQ.

Ewen

[0] I did get one offer of a supposedly complete archive, but alas
    my mail to ask for a copy was bounced.