Hi all, We have 870+ mailing lists and about 20 gigs worth of stuff in the private/archives directory. I thought I would do a little spring cleaning, such as sending mail to list owners to see if they still want their lists. But I would also like to pare down the size of the archives directory, which have been allowed to grow wild, using cron jobs. Before I do that, I want to get assurance from this list that I fully understand how the archives are written. We are currently running Mailman v2.1.5 and we'll upgrade to v2.1.10 later this summer. Please confirm the assumptions I am about to make before I write the preening scripts for cron. I also want to write a bunch of scripts that look for certain information. 1) If a list is digestable and archiving was never turned on, then the archives/private/listname/index.html will contain only the originally-created file (which basically says "No messages have been posted to this list yet, so the archives are currently empty"). 2) If there is no mbox file in the /archives/private/listname.mbox directory, then the list has never had archiving turned on. 3) If a list is digestable but there is no attachments directory in /archives/private/listname, then the list has never had a message posted to it. 4) If the list is digestable, and archiving has never been turned on, then files in the archives/private/listname/attachments directory are only useful to already-existing subscribers who have digesting turned on (ie if I poll a list and it has no members subscribed as digest users, then it is safe to delete all files in the attachments tree). If all of my above assumptions are correct, my psuedo-code would do something like this: if (list is not archived and has no digest members) keep stuff in attachments dir for 1 month; if (list is not archived but does have digest members) keep stuff in attachments dir for 1 year; if (list is archived) keep stuff in attachments dir for 3 years; For the archived lists (we have about 150 of them) I will contact the owners first, to warn them that I plan to pare their archive down to 3 years max. If they protest, I will add them as an exception to the rule and skip over them during the cron job run. I know that there is more to be done with regards to reducing the size of archives (ie running arch --wipe on the editted, pared down .mbox file, but I will do that manually). For now I am mostly interesting in keeping the stuff in the attachments directories to a minimum. I realize that deleting stuff in /attachments breaks links in the archive and digest messages, but I think that is reasonable for the really old messages (provided the list owner concurs). One final question. I know that you can change a list's settings with /bin/config_list, but can you poll a list for settings? For example, you can use "/bin/list_members -d" to see which members of a list read in digest mode, but how can I find out which lists have archiving turned on? Or do I have to examine the archives/private tree to garner that kind of info? Thanks! - jim - ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp