Re: bounce.pl

Jeff Breidenbach <[email protected]> writes:

> I'd like to improve ease of importing messages (although it's not
> very high on the priority list.) But don't really know a good way of
> doing it. Resending over SMTP seems like the only easy way for
> Mail-Archive to avoid dealing with corrupt data. But what is easy
> for Mail-Archive is not necessarily easy for users. Suggestions
> appreciated.

The important thing is for the categorization rules to be clear.  If
you can guarantee, say, that a Mailman-style "List-Id" header will
take precedence over everything else, then you can tell people to add
such a header when importing messages.

There are some subtleties, like malformed or duplicate List-Id
headers...  But as long as the rules are documented, it doesn't matter
very much.

Then you, or your fans :-), can provide helper Perl scripts.  I would
suggest a script which takes a list address and an mbox file, and then
can operate in one of two modes:

  Mode 1) Create/replace List-Id header on all messages, then forward
          to mail-archive.

or

  Mode 2) Validate List-Id header, only forwarding messages which
          already have the expected header.

The point is that there is really nothing wrong with using SMTP to
import messages, as long as the user has some way to ensure that the
forwarded messages end up in the "right" archive.

 - Pat