Finally got around to looking at the problems with the majordomo 'index' and
'get' commands. It is working better now. What one does is basically two
steps.
Step one is to see what files are available for perusal. You send a command
to majordomo@autox.team.net, the command being in the text of the message, the
subject can be blank, or your high school nickname, your mother's maiden name,
a valid credit car number, whatever. It is ignored. What is important is
the form of the command. For this list, you would send:
index shop-talk
You will get back a listing of available files, such as
...
390681 Nov 30 18:39 shop-talk.archive.0011
505578 Dec 30 20:00 shop-talk.archive.0012
118493 Jan 11 22:57 shop-talk.archive.0101
The format is fairly straightforward, each line is of the form
File size Date File_Name
Those who grok Unix might recognise it as a simple 'ls -l | cut ...' output.
The file name is quite simple, it is basically list-name.archive.YYMM, so
the name 'shop-talk.archive.0012' means the shop-talk archive for Dec, 2000.
Yes, the files are collected in month long batches. For some lists, no sweat;
for busy lists, like triumphs or spitfires where you have a lot of folks
posting who can't edit their included text in the replies or have a lot of
ego droppings tacked on the end of their messages, a month's mail could be
three or four megabytes. Make sure your mail system can handle files of that
size before making use of the 'get' command.
If you wanted the July of '97 archive for, say, the triumphs list, you'd do
an index on triumphs and look for triumphs.archive.9707 in the returned
message. In truth, at the moment only the last 8 months or so of all the
lists are on line, the rest is still on the old server. RealSoonNow....
The second step is to fetch the file from the archive. For this, you send mail
to majordomo@autox.team.net with one or more 'get' commands in the body of
the message, e.g.
get shop-talk shop-talk.archive.0101
get triumphs triumphs.archive.9707
get marcos marcos.archive.0008
get mini-baja mini-baja.archive.0009
Each of the files named will be mailed back to you by majordomo. Enjoy.
Of course, a better approach is a searchable, browsable, web based engine,
like that at www.listquest.com. Too bad all the mail to that site started
bouncing a while back and I had to stop sending them all the list archives.
Anyway, hope you can make use of the above info.
mjb.
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