Topic on Talk:Mailing lists/Flow

Maybe I missed something, but I have yet to find a good way to search the archives of a list. When doing research I commonly want to read all the old messages and grep through them. So I wrote this little bash script:

#!/bin/bash

_URL="http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/"

if test -n "$( find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.txt' -print -quit )"
then
        echo 'Deleting old archives...'
        rm *.txt
fi

for _GZIP_FILE in $( wget --quiet -O - $_URL | perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /href="(\d{4}[^"]+\.gz)"/g;' )
do
        echo "Fetching $_GZIP_FILE..."
        wget --quiet "${_URL}${_GZIP_FILE}"
        gunzip $_GZIP_FILE
done

Create a new folder, put this script it there and then run it. Might be useful to somebody else...

Assuming you're speaking of mailman mailing lists, you can just download the whole archive in mbox format. Look for mailman docs.

OMG, so much easier. Found this, and it worked for me:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/private/mediawiki-l.mbox/mediawiki-l.mbox?username=____________ 

Thanks!