[admin] Fwd: Removal of a message from the Toronto Lisp mailing list archive

[Nikodemus Siivola]

> From: Rudolf <omouse at gmail.com>
> To: mailman at common-lisp.net
> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:42:19 -0400
> Subject: Removal of a message from the Toronto Lisp mailing list archive
> Hi, someone accidently sent an email out to the mailing list:
  --snip--
>
> Is it possible to remove it from the archive? I'm actually the list
> manager for the toronto-lisp mailing list, but apparently there's no
> way to remove the message via the web interface.

Last time I looked at doing something like this, IIRC what I
discovered was that you can do it, but it is a pain:

 1. Stop accepting mail for the list.
 2. Cut out the offending bit from the mbox file.
 3. Nuke and regenerate the archives.
 4. Start accepting mail for the list.

1 and 4 are needed so that you don't accidentally lose incoming
messages while you're hacking the mbox file. You could also just take
that risk, or carefully do a destructive edit, replacing the contents
of the message with the Xs or something -- but that is far to fiddly
to my mind.

In other words, to the best of my knowledge there is no way to keep a
message in the mbox, but nuke it from the archives. Unless I am
mistaken on this count, in my opinion cleaning up trivial
mistake-emails like this is not worth the trouble.

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus