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Why are the dates broken on messages imported from a maildir?
Why is lurker warning about From lines during my import?
How do I add support for my language to lurker?
How do I change the output language?
Why are all my dates off by a fixed hour / don't use "From " header?
Why shouldn't I open the lurker mboxs with a mail reader?
Why do I get "opening database: Operation not supported" on MacOS?
I run postfix and lurker doesn't import any new email; why?
Why not store all the messages as XML instead of rendering them as it?
How can I delete a mailing list?
---
Q: Why are the dates broken on messages imported from a maildir?
A: You probably imported from a maildir which was improperly copied/created.
Normal 'cp' will reset the modification time of messages. With the
maildir format, the modification time in new/ is the delivery time.
When copying a maildir use 'tar' or 'cp -a' to properly preserve this
information.
Another problem are mailbox to maildir conversion scripts. Most seem to
have been written by people with an incomplete understanding of the
maildir and/or mailbox formats. You should never use lurker in
combination with a conversion scripts. Lurker has very good mailbox
support and should import directly from the original copy.
Q: Why is lurker warning about From lines during my import?
A: Lurker tries to detect corrupt mailboxes. If the quoted text included
in the warning was not the start of a new message, then lurker just
fixed your mailbox for you.
On the other hand, if the quoted text was a message boundary, you have
a badly corrupted mailbox. You will have to repair this mailbox somehow.
What lurker choose to do in this case was combine those two messages into
a single message which was not correct. You should fix the mailbox, purge
your database, and reimport. Do not import corrupted mailboxes!
Be aware that when importing with '-m' lurker will always treat lines
starting with 'From ' as part of the message body without a warning.
Q: How do I add support for my language to lurker?
A: First, find out your ISO 639 language code.
All the valid ISO 639 language codes are contained in lang.xml.
If your language does not have a standardized country code, contact
lurker-users and express your intent to translate and ask what to do.
Check the entry in lang.xml and confirm that your language's name is
spelt correctly in the language you are translating to. Change
localized="no" to localized="yes".
Copy en.xml to xx.xml were xx is the country code of the new language.
Edit xx.xml replacing the quoted ("") english fields with a UTF-8
encoding of the same string, but in the new language.
Check that the translation works by loading the lurker front-page and
exploring all the possible types of lurker web-pages.
Send your freshly created file to lurker-users@lists.sourceforge.net
so that you will be included in the lurker credits and other people
can benefit from your work!
Q: How do I change the output language?
A: This used to be a global setting; hence this FAQ entry.
Now the language is selected from the user interface.
Q: Why are all my dates off by a fixed hour / don't use "From " header?
A: The computer which imports mail should be in the same timezone as the
computer which archived the mail. This is because mailbox timestamp
envelopes are generated in local time. You can set your local timezone
for the purposes of indexing with the TZ environment variable.
Q: Why shouldn't I open the lurker mboxs with a mail reader?
A: Mail readers like to modify the X-Status header by adding or removing
flags which denote that the message is new, or opened, or read, etc.
These changes result in displacement changes in the file even if you do
nothing but read the file. Also, your mail reader may re-order messages
by some criterea. Finally, you might accidentally delete a message.
Solutions:
1. Use a procmail rule to copy mail to a lurker mbox and your own mbox
which you delete messages from:
:0 c
lurkers-copy.mbox
2. Make the mailbox read only for you, but appendable by the mail
user (or whatever user appends to the mbox):
chown mail.youruser lurkers.mbox
chmod 0640 lurkers.mbox
Q: Why do I get "opening database: Operation not supported" on MacOS?
A: You are running the lurker database on a filesystem which does not
support file locking. Lurker cannot run safely on such a filesystem and
thus refuses to possibly corrupt the database.
Q: I run postfix and lurker doesn't import any new email; why?
A: Postfix sets a file size resource limit. The intention of this option
is to limit the size of mailboxes delivered to. Unfortunately, this
option also applies to ALL files opened by child processes.
This means lurker will die with SIGXFSZ when accessing the database!
You must tell postfix not to set a file limit or use another MTA.
mailbox_size_limit = 0
If you have a postfix with a soft limit (does not exist yet), then
compile the stand-alone file lurker-drop-rlimit.cpp and run it infront of
lurker-index like:
lurker-drop-rlimit lurker-index -c /etc/lurker.conf -l devel -m
Q: Why not store all the messages as XML instead of rendering them?
A: Lurker is designed to hold lots of email. Many other programs need
mailing list archives in mbox format. It doesn't cost much for me to
re-parse a specific email, so there is not much speed lost. On the
other hand, I save a lot of disk space.
Example of archivers that use mbox->html + indexer:
1Gb mbox
2Gb html (larger on average)
500Mb index
---
250% space wasted
Example of lurker:
1Gb mbox
300Mb index
---
30% space wasted
As you can see, since lurker builds the index from the *mbox* the index
should be smaller. Furthermore, why store the larger html/xml when most
of it probably won't be accessed?
Finally, even though I like XML, I think it is important to be able to
retreive to original email without any concerns that translation back and
forth may have slightly altered the contents of the email. Therefore, I
consider keeping the mbox essential, and it seems natural to leave the
data in this native format.
Q: How can I delete a mailing list?
A: Bad answer: 'lurker-search -c lurker.conf -d ml:listid -v'
Good answer: delete the mailbox and reimport.
You can certainly perform the delete command shown above, but
cross-posted emails will then also be deleted. Furthermore, if you are
deleting that many messages, you probably want your disk space back.
A better solution is to remove the mailing list entry in the lurker.conf,
delete it's mailbox in the database directory, and run lurker-regenerate.
Cross-posted messages will remain in the database, and you will recover
your disk space.
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