[hypermail] hypermail

I think that running hypermail without collecting your data in an mbox is a poor idea, and that the fact that you are using you alias file to feed hypermail doesn't stand in the way of collecting an mbox. What I do at my site, where we run several hundred hypermail lists, is use lines in the alias file like this:

  hype-ms: :include: /www/mail/ms-talks

What that says is to look to the contents of that file for instructions on what to do with email. In that file, we have, for this example:

  /www/htdocs/news/ms-talks/mbox
  "|/usr/adm/sm.bin/hypermail -lMSTalks -uid /www/htdocs/news/ms-talks"

That's two lines. The first collects all the mail in an mbox, and the second runs hypermail. Having an mbox makes it really easy to clean up both unwanted messages and recover from hypermail failure (which is a blissfully rare need these days, TG).

But that doesn't speak to your question. There is a program in the contrib section called hype2mbox.pl, a perl script that will attempt to create an mbox from an existing hypermail archive. It can't do a perfect job- some data in the original mail isn't present in the hypermail archive- but it does okay. Attachments are lost, unless something has changed.

Another option would be to hack up dummy messages to fill the holes, but I haven't tried that.

Hope this helps.

> I've been providing hypermail for years now for internal use within my

> organization and have run into a situation that I don't know how to
deal
> with. I used to recommend keeping a large email box and generating
> hypermail each time and it was relatively easy to clean up using your
> favorite mailer and regenerating the box. But now most of us are
running
> hypermail automatically via adding a line to our alias as documented
in
> http://www.landfield.com/hypermail/source/docs/hypermail.html#6 .

> I'm not sure how to clean up old email with the update, so suggestions
are
> welcome. The simple approach of removing old or selective messages
started
> the numbering over again at 0000.html when the next message
> was sent and ignored the other messages.
Received on Wed 17 Jan 2001 12:30:55 AM GMT