Email discussion archives

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

A little while back I mentioned that discussions regarding new iTLD's had
been going on for the past couple of years and some of that discussion
took place on mailing lists whose archives were WWW accessible.

I have collected those archives and I now have them available in a couple
of different formats that may be easier for some of you to deal with.

http://pinky.junction.net/memra/newdom.zip
This file contains a directory tree with a compressed website containing
the entire available archives of the three different newdom lists up to
this week. This archive is 11 megs and unzips to about 32 megs.
On a DOS system, unzip this with the command

pkunzip -d newdom

Then use your browser to open the local file newdom\index.html
On a UNIX system use the GNU unzip command

unzip -a newdom

to strip off DOS [CR] characters as it is unzipped. Or pick up
http://pinky.junction.net/memra/newdom.tar.gz which is only 5.5 megs

This local website archive may be useful for doing searches.

http://pinky.junction.net/memra/mbx.zip
This archive contains the same messages but with further processing to
turn them into standard mailbox format files which also shrinks them
to about 14 megs unzipped. For DOS

pkunzip mbx

and for UNIX

unzip -a mbx

The archives are in 7 files, one for each subdirectory of the iiia.org
list, one for the ar.com list and one for the vrx.net list. The mailbox
files were tested with both PINE on UNIX and with Eudora on Win 3.1. The
archive has the files named with a .MBX extension for Eudora and with
DOS [CR] characters. Other email programs will probably read these files
by placing them in the correct directory and renaming them with the
correct extension.

Since the files are rather large I have made two utilities available to
break them into smaller chunks.

http://pinky.junction.net/memra/msplit
This is a PERL program that splits a mailbox into separate files
with a fixed number of messages per file. For instance

msplit ar.mbx 200 ar .mbx

Would take the messages from "ar.mbx", count out 200 at a time and deposit
them in new files named by sticking "ar", a number and ".mbx" together,
i.e. ar0000.mbx, ar0001.mbx. On dos make sure the prefix is no more than 4
characters.

msplit ar.mbx 1 ar .txt

Would break out the messages into individual file ar0000.txt, ar0001.txt
which may be useful with some UNIX email programs or search tools.

PERL is available for MS-DOS, Macintosh, Windows...  http://www.perl.com

http://pinky.junction.net/msplit.bas
This is a DOS qbasic program that does the same job as the PERL script.
If you have QBASIC, then the following command will run it

qbasic /run msplit.bas

At this point it prompts for the filename, num of messages, prefix and
suffix. This program will probably also work with BASICA or GWBASIC
but I don't seem to have a copy to test with. Try the following

basica
load "msplit.bas
run
system

or use "gwbasic" if your system doesn't have the "basica" command.

gwbasic
load "msplit.bas
run
system

Hopefully this will assist those of you who want to review the past
discussion. I know that I hate browsing email archives on the web
and much prefer to use PINE for UNIX or to run PINE for DOS with a local
mailbox file.

Note that the mailbox format of these archives is *NOT* the original
form but is a "reconstituted" mailbox format created using some
information that iiia.org and ar.com had available in HTML comments on
each message. The vrx.net archives were already plain text files but
needed a fake "From " line and fake Message-Id to be acceptable in mailbox
format. Also, the vrx.net mailing list was not archived for the first few
weeks of its existence so some messages are lost.

Get these archives while you can because I may not have them available on
this website for very long. 

Michael Dillon                   -               ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com