On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 7:20 PM, Rob Hudson <[email protected]> wrote: > Chris wrote: >> I was just wondering if there might be news about the list archives >> coming back online (or maybe I have the wrong link(s))? Anything I/we >> can do to help? > > Also - is there the possibility of hosting what's currently there in the > interim for people to access and search themselves?
As mentioned in another piece of email, since September 2012, the list archives have been hosted here: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ (Sorry, just realized that the list info page changes to reflected that did not, for some reason, take effect. Will fix that shortly.) When I'd last written about hosting the archives with the Mail Archive site, I'd asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to help with migrating the old data to the mail-archive.com system; I heard back from one volunteer, but they never followed through (or I lost mail from them, also possible), and I've been too busy to work on it myself. It's a big-ish project (and I've since discovered that we may no longer have the original mail files for everything, which makes it even more complicated), but if anyone's up for it, they'd earn the O-list world's gratitude. I include the "job description" below. Get in touch with me off list if you've got the skills described below, and have the time/inclination to help! Anne --- Stuff to Do to Migrate the Old List Data: --- (2) someone (*) needs to get in touch with the support team at the Mail Archive and explain what we'd like to do, namely, at least: - that we've got 20+ years of old mail that we'd like to (eventually) submit - that all this old mail will have been delivered to multiple hosts over the years as the list as moved between servers - we want to be really careful about protecting people's email addresses and ask whether they have any specific recommendations/warnings/needs for the old data (beyond it needing to be in mbox format.) http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html has lots of details, but I think we need actual contact with their tech folks. (*) said someone needs to, at the very least, understand enough of the underpinnings of email and networked computing to know about email structure, mbox mail file formatting, character sets, mime encoding, and the like. (3) Someone then needs to play information wrangler, and contact the previous archivist(s) and get copies of all the old mail; then gather any mail since the latest archive stopped in 2010 (I have all of that, myself, plus lots of the past mail if there are any holes.) I can provide shared networked filespace to facilitate this, if needed, or we could use Dropbox or its cousins. (4) Someone (or several someones) need to clean the data and convert it, as needed, into properly-formatted and -encoded mbox file(s), including any changes that the Mail Archives folk suggest, as needed. This could entail scripted or by-hand raw text editing of the files, and could be rather laborious, but ought to be possible in chunks, and could thus easily be spread out to suitably capable volunteers. (If any of it needs to be checked/edited by hand, this means careful use of a plain-text editor capable of reliably specifying text encodings - Word and all its ilk are Right Out. This is not really a task for computing novices, nor for the faint of heart.) I can provide account-level access to the O-list server machine (which runs Linux) to facilitate any scripting needs, etc. (We could plop the stuff into a database, too, if anyone wants to try that path; but I'm not sure that's worth it unless someone wants to volunteer to go down the roll-our-own-archive-service route. But I could be wrong, and persuaded to do almost anything to get this moving!) (5) Finally, the tidied files all get gzip'd and put online somewhere (O-list server space happily made available for this) and then we ask the Mail Archive folks to go upload them.
