From: Rudolf omouse@gmail.com To: mailman@common-lisp.net Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:42:19 -0400 Subject: Removal of a message from the Toronto Lisp mailing list archive Hi, someone accidently sent an email out to the mailing list:

--snip--

Is it possible to remove it from the archive? I'm actually the list manager for the toronto-lisp mailing list, but apparently there's no way to remove the message via the web interface.

Last time I looked at doing something like this, IIRC what I discovered was that you can do it, but it is a pain:

1. Stop accepting mail for the list. 2. Cut out the offending bit from the mbox file. 3. Nuke and regenerate the archives. 4. Start accepting mail for the list.

1 and 4 are needed so that you don't accidentally lose incoming messages while you're hacking the mbox file. You could also just take that risk, or carefully do a destructive edit, replacing the contents of the message with the Xs or something -- but that is far to fiddly to my mind.

In other words, to the best of my knowledge there is no way to keep a message in the mbox, but nuke it from the archives. Unless I am mistaken on this count, in my opinion cleaning up trivial mistake-emails like this is not worth the trouble.

Cheers,

-- Nikodemus