Michael,
Thank you for the updated notes. >This is pretty complicated. I feel inspired to see how dist and >rcvdist manage to bounce a message without using the To: line >as a recipient. Do you have an idea how this works? For email, the actual recipient for a given message is determined by the SMTP protocol. That's why you can BCC someone a message and they'll get it, without their address appearing in any headers. That said, I've never used dist and rcvdist. You can telnet to port 25 of some mail handling machine and type HELP to get more familiar with the SMTP protocol. >Do you think it'd be worthwhile if I wrote a perl or shell script >which would allow someone to do all of this work with one (brief) >command, without having to use MH? You can probably evaluate this better than me, since you are one of the few people who have actually imported archives. I suspect I will be more and more often faced with the question "How do I import an archive?" and I'd love to put a ridiculously simple answer in the FAQ. (I'm still a little wary of letting people HTTP upload their mbox file directly into mail-archive.com's mail spool, even though this might be easiest to use.) Jeff PS. Why did you need to use x-mailing-list? It's a good idea, of course, but I'm curious: Did the automated sorting heuristics fail?
