From: Paul Haldane (Paul.Haldane@newcastle.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Sep 02 1999 - 10:01:43 CDT
On Thu, 2 Sep 1999 jose.kahan@w3.org wrote:
> In our previous episode, Paul Haldane said:
>
...
> > Only minor downside I can think of at the moment is that if you regenerate
> > an archive after deleting a message from near the start of the mailbox,
> > then the URLs of subsequent attachments will change. I don't consider
> > this a real problem.
> >
...
> Note that it's important to never break URLs that point to archives. I want
> to add something akin to a "blackmail" file where you can put msgid's of
> messages that should be removed from the archive. Then, we would just skip
> those messages (erasing any previously related files), but correctly
> increment the message num counter.
Interesting idea. I'll explain why I don't think that will really work so
some people.
At the place I used to work, we offered access to mailing list archives
through several mechanisms - ftp, web (direct access to mbox format
files), email access to mbox format files, hypermail archive.
Now the hypermail archive is generated from the mbox file so we couldn't
leave the offending message in the mbox even if hypermail was clever
enough to skip over it.
In reality I don't think it would be a problem for us as we'd generally be
told pretty much immediately if someone needed to 'unsend' a message.
Alternative approach would be to replace the offending message with a
dummy one - possibly with some special message-id so that it isn't shown
by hypermail but is counted. Actually - that solves the problem for us -
put the msgid of the message into your "blackmail" file and replace the
body of the message with text indicating that it has been removed.
Paul