3.63. Help! My mailing list archives are messed up and have messages with bad timestamps and in the wrong date order!

Q: I'm seeing some messages in my archives that are showing up in the far future or in the far past, but they were actually just sent or received recently. How can I fix this?

See also the canned Google search at http://tinyurl.com/jsqsu, to view other times that this question has come up on the mailman-users mailing list.

A: Only the site administrator can fix this, by putting an entry in the mm_cfg.py file, or changing the current setting in this file. The current default entry would look something like this:

  # This sets the default `clobber date' policy for the archiver.
  # When a message is to be archived either by Pipermail or an
  # external archiver, Mailman can modify the Date: header to be
  # the date the message was received instead of the Date: in the
  # original message.  This is useful if you typically receive
  # messages with outrageous dates.  Set this to 0 to retain
  # the date of the original message, or to 1 to always clobber
  # the date.  Set it to 2 to perform `smart overrides' on the
  # date; when the date is outside
  # ARCHIVER_ALLOWABLE_SANE_DATE_SKEW (either too early or too
  # late), then the received date is substituted instead.
  ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY = 2
  ARCHIVER_ALLOWABLE_SANE_DATE_SKEW = days(15)

The site administrator could choose to set the policy to be "1" instead of "2", and all "Date:" headers on messages will be corrected as of the time the archive is built, thus hopefully putting the messages back into the right order. Or, the "skew" could be reduced, so that messages are corrected based on a smaller window of time.

NOTE: Unfortunately, this technique may lead to some other problems – if the archive is rebuilt manually in the future, then those messages might get re-fixed again with the current date/time stamp as of that point, which would cause all these messages to be moved around in the archive.

This is an aspect of this feature that we hope will be fixed in the near future.

See also the message at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2006-August/052646.html for a little more on this subject.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.