Re: Mailman and summary

On June 20, 2003 at 09:30, Todd Slater wrote:

> > > You will need to create a custom filter that understand pipermail
> > > HTML pages.  Namazu already has one for MHonArc archives, but
> > > I do think there are any filters for other mail archivers.
> > 
> > Tokio Kikuchi already wrote a filter for pipermail.
> > You can get it from 
> > <http://mm.tkikuchi.net/pipermail.pl>

Looking at the filter, it appears you will not get any field based
indexing.  I.e. Namazu has special support for mail messages by
expliciting index header fields like Subject, From, Date, etc.
Then, in namazu, you can do field-based searches.  For example,

  +from:earlhood

will search for all messages that contain "earlhood" in From.

The way pipermail formats its messages, I do not know if any field
indexing can be done.

> 
> Oh thank you, that's a huge help!

Of course, I recommend MHonArc for archiving your mail ;-)

Serching for the words "integrating mailman mhonarc" on Google
gives some hits that should help in using mailman with mhonarc.

I personally recommend keeping the web archiving and the list
management components seprate.  This can be done by creating a special
user account that you subscribe to all the lists you want archived and
the run MHonArc (or other archiving software) under that user account.

A good example of this model is mharc, <http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/>.
Mharc uses MHonArc, Namazu, and Procmail to give you scalable,
searchable, web-based mail archives.  You can read the installation
instruction of mharc at <http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/doc/install.html>
to get an idea of what is involved in setting it up.  One thing
that mharc does is leverage some of the unique features of namazu to
provide archive navigational aids.

Note, the guys at GNU are using mharc for their mailman managed lists
(which includes lists created for projects hosted on Savannah),
but I do not know if there was any special integration performed.

One of the problems with the stock pipermail archives of mailman is
that providing things like searching and doing custom layout is not
that easy.  I also think pipermail may be weak in its MIME support.

--ewh