Are the old archives ever going to be available?

[Peter Corlett]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2015 at 12:17:09PM -0800, Thomas Dzubin wrote:
> I'm aware that "something" happened at the end of October 2014 and the cctalk
> archives (http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/ ) aren't currently
> available before then. Is this a permanent situation?

The whole cctalk list was lost and re-created from scratch, and I guess that
includes the archives.

> I used to occasionally search through old archive postings for various VAX
> information and found it very useful. Just asking...I'm not trying to be
> pushy.

The Wayback Machine indexed cctalk before the crash, so you can download the
archives from there. Howver, it's a bit tedious to grab the whole lot, so I'll
stick a copy on my webspace at http://abuse.mooli.org.uk/cctalk/

It's still uploading because BT will only give this this corner of Islington
wet string rather than broadband (and Virgin Media can't even keep their string
moist), but there will eventually be two files:

cctalk-upstream-txtgz.zip

  A zipfile containing all of the original "downloadable version"s of the
  archive from 2005-February.txt.gz through 2014-October.txt.gz.

cctalk-maildir.tpxz

  The messages from above, massaged into a Maildir++ mailbox with folders
  cctalk/2005 through cctalk/2014, tarred and xz-compressed. This will make
  most sense to users who run their own IMAP server on Unix as they can just
  merge it in to their existing mailbox and let their MUA do the indexing and
  searching.

  It's not all in one folder because that's about 200k messages which is a bit
  unwieldy, but splitting by year gives roughly 20k messages per mailbox which
  is much more tractable.

The exact range of message dates archived is 2005-02-26 20:15:19 through
2014-10-02 08:31:19 (all UTC).