Re: [Lurker-users] HowTo delete old mails from archive

[Wesley W. T. <we...@te...>]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:42 AM, <lu...@pl...> wrote:

> maybe this is a strange question. (to an archiving software)
> But is there a (easy :-) ) way to delete,"cleanup" old messages/threads
> which
> are, lets say, 1 year old?
>

Unfortunately, not so easily.

lurker-search can mark messages as deleted based on a search criteria.
lurker-regenerate drops messages marked as deleted during reindexing. This
suggest a two-step approach where you tag all the old messages as deleted
and then run lurker-regenerate to reclaim the space.

The problem is that lurker-search does not support searching based on date.
You can readily delete all the emails by a given author or to a particular
list, but not based on age. Thus you're stuck with painful approaches like:

One solution would be to decompress the mailbox files (gzip -c
/lurker-db/mailinglist > /tmp/mailinglist). Then open a text editor and
remove all the messages from the start of the file up to a message with an
acceptable date (they should be sorted oldest to newest). Repeat for each
mailing list. Nuke your database and run lurker-index on your newly trimmed
mailboxes.

Obviously, this approach is suboptimal. It would be relatively easy to add a
date range clause to lurker-search, and I might be convinced to do so. Then
you could use this enhanced lurker-search to tag old email and
lurker-regenerate to reclaim the space.