North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Andriy Palamarchuk <apa3a@yahoo.com>]

Hi everybody,
  after a few years I joined NAFEX again. Recently I wanted to search for 
some information in the archives of this mailing list, but discovered that 
there is no web interface for that. The archives on 
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/nafex/ can not be searched by outside 
search engines either, because they are password-protected. One can only 
browse the messages.

Below is the description of the procedure I used to import the email messages 
from the archive files into a mail client Thunderbird. Thunderbird provides 
nice, treaded view of the messages and quick search functionality.

Note 1: I'm on Ubuntu Linux, so these instructions will work for Linux, 
probably will work for Mac OS X. I will give suggestions on how to accomplish 
this on Windows, but Windows users need to confirm that they work.

Note 2: steps 1 and 2 can be done by a single person, who may then upload the 
resulting file on a members-only web site. Dow we have such web space? This 
would make setting up search and updating the message archive much easier and 
more accessible for non-technical users. I suggest to put the instructions on 
the mailing list description page. Otherwise the archive search setup 
instructions can be found only by search :-) I can maintain the single-file 
message archive.


STEP 1. Download all the monthly archives

Go to https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/nafex/ and download all the monthly 
archives, except the archive for the current month, because it is still being 
updated. In Firefox you can do this by right-clicking on all the links "[ 
Gzip'd Text XXX KB ]" in the right column of the table and choosing the "Save 
Link As..." popup menu item. You'll get 99 files named like 
"2010-March.txt.gz". That's a lot of clicking :-)

Put all these files into a separate directory.


STEP 2. Concatenate the monthly archives into a single file

On Linux and (probably) on Mac OS X you can do this in the command-line 
terminal window by running the following command in the directory with the 
files:

cat *.txt.gz > NAFEX

You'll get a large (73 Mb) file called "NAFEX" containing the content of all 
the monthly archives. The archived version of the file is about 18 Mb. 

On Windows use the following command:

copy /a  *.txt.gz > NAFEX


STEP 3. Load the archive into the desktop mail client

I use the mail client Thunderbird. You can download this nice program from 
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/ . It is developed by the 
same community, which created the Firefox web browser.

For the email clients other than Thunderbird, check if they have ability to 
import "mbox" email archive format or "Unix mailbox". You can experiment with 
a single month archive to verify whether the message import works.

Thunderbird uses the mbox format natively. Find where Thunderbird stores its 
mail database. This is somewhere in your user directory. On Linux, for 
example, this is in "~/.mozilla-thunderbird/<profile name>/Mail/Local 
Folders". Copy the NAFEX file into the "Local Folders" directory in the 
Thunderbird directory, restart Thunderbird. Thunderbird will show the NAFEX 
folder with all the messages under "Local Folders".

On my not that powerful computer Thunderbird easily handles all the 33101 
messages for more than 7 years of the archive.

Questions, comments, suggestions?
Andriy

Zone 6, Eastern MA