Importing existing messages from a mailing list I just set to archive

[sebersole]

I recently asked nabble to archive a mail list for an Open Source project I work on : http://hibernate-development.74578.x6.nabble.com/

I was surprised that existing messages were not displayed.  Considering the wording is "archive".  Did I miss something in the set up?  Should existing messages show up?  If not, can I make them?

[GregChapman]

A mail list server does not store past messages. It only stores a list of current subscribers. Its only function is to pass on messages it receives not to store them. Nabble can only archive new messages posted to your mail list.

In essence what you are doing in setting up a Nabble archive is to subscribe your new Nabble application to your existing mail list. Nabble then posts any messages it receives as a new subscriber to a dedicated Nabble forum.

If you wish to backdate the archive you will need to supply an MBOX format file of past messages that you have collected and ask Nabble to post them to your forum. There is a special area of the Support forum for you to do this:
http://support.nabble.com/Mbox-import-f7590796.html

[sebersole]

Maybe I do not understand the proper terminology, but it would seem that our MailMan server is in fact storing historical posts: http://lists.jboss.org/pipermail/hibernate-dev/.  That's the url from the MailMan info page for our list for seeing archives.

[sebersole]

Either way, I found a means to get the mbox format from the mailman server: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-September/046757.html

I'll post the mbox over there.  Thanks

[GregChapman]

I probably explained things badly. The answer is hidden in the second paragraph of my post:

In essence what you are doing in setting up a Nabble archive is to subscribe your new Nabble application to your existing mail list. Nabble then posts any messages it receives as a new subscriber to a dedicated Nabble forum.

so Nabble will only get mail from the time you subscribe it to your mail list. It does not attempt to retrieve any mail backlog.

There are many forms and format of archive on other mail list servers and the requests for backlogs to be installed on Nabble are sufficiently rare for it not to have proved worthwhile working on automating the process. Perhaps more importantly, sucking off an entire backlog put an unacceptable load on some servers and not be at all welcome by their operators. It's not inconceivable that it could be sucked into a DDOS attack if the process was available for any Nabble user to initiate automatically.

[sebersole]

Greg, is there anything else we should do after posting in that forum?  I created request just a few days ago, but there is another request that has been sitting there for a few weeks now.

[GregChapman]

Unfortunately, Nabble Support can be very slow at the moment.

Some of my Premium Support posts have not received attention with the spped they would have had a few months ago.