From: Scott Rose (srose@direct.ca)
Date: Wed Feb 14 2001 - 09:14:15 CST
> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 02:46:44 -0800 (PST)
> From: Henry Potter <henrypotter10@yahoo.com>
> Subject: [hypermail] Monthly archiving of incoming mails
>
> Hello. I'm not quite sure if this question has been answered but would
> really appreciate your advise.
>
> I have emails coming into my inbox in a unix environment. i am using
> hypermail to convert them into webpages as they come in.
>
> as the mail traffic is quite high i'd like to move the hypermail
> webpages into an archive (perhaps on another server). how can i do this
> without disrupting the hypermail process which is handling the incoming
> mails?
The way I handle this for my archives is by doing thus.
1. I have a directory named for the list and the time period, which collects
the archive. Say it's rotated monthly and the list is called "doggy"; the
archive is doggy_0201 for this month and year (Feb 2001).
2. I have a symlink to that directory called "doggy".
3. The recipe for creation of the archive directs the archive to be built in
"doggy".
4. Monthly, for this example, cron runs a perl script that changes the symlink
from linking to doggy_0201 to, at midnight on March 1 for this example, to
doggy_0301.
This is sloppy- I should first create a lock file in the 0201 directory- to
keep hypermail from trying to build an archive in the middle of the symlink
change- but that's the way I do it. When there are thousands of emails in an
archive, hypermail can take quite a while to build an archive, so this isn't
entirely unlikely.
I can share the perl script that does the symlink changing if you like, but
it's not a great masterpiece of coding that will save you a lot of work.
Sorry if this has already been addressed; I get the digest, which suffers a
delay.
People often suggest integrating list rotation into hypermail, but it seems
slightly misdirected to me. OTOH, it would be a way to assure that hypermail
doesn't encounter a change of venue in the middle of an archiving step.