[Python-Dev] Accessing mailing list archives (original) (raw)

Cameron Simpson cs at cskk.id.au
Tue Jul 31 20:46:39 EDT 2018

On 30Jul2018 13:40, Bob Purvy <bpurvy at gmail.com> wrote:

I've been trying to figure out how to access the archives programmatically. I'm sure this is easy once you know, but googling various things hasn't worked. What I want to do is graph the number of messages about PEP 572 by time. (or has someone already done that?)

I installed GNU Mailman, and downloaded the gzip'ed archives for a number of months and unzipped them, and I suspect that there's some way to get them all into a single database, but it hasn't jumped out at me. If I count the "Message-ID" lines, the "Subject:" lines, and the "\nFrom " lines in one of those text files, I get slightly different numbers for each. Alternatively, they're maybe already in a database, and I just need API access to do the querying? Can someone help me out?

Like Victor, I download mailing list archives. Between pulling them in and also subscribing, ideally I get a complete history in my "python" mail folder.
Likewise for other lists.

The mailman archives are UNIX mbox files, compressed, with a bit of header munging (to make address harvesting harder). You can concatenate them and uncompress and reverse the munging like this:

cat *.gz | gunzip | fix-mail-dates --mbox | un-at-

where fix-mail-dates is here:

https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css/src/tip/bin/fix-mail-dates

and un-at- is here:

https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css/src/tip/bin/un-at-

and the output is a nice UNIX mbox file.

You can load that into most mail readers or parse it with Python's email modules (in the stdlib). It should be easy enough to scan such a thing and count header contents etc. Ignore the "From " line content, prefer the "From:" header. (Separate messages on "From " of course, just don't grab email addresses from it.)

Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>

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