qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent written by D. J. Bernstein. To learn more check qmail home page and qmail resource page.

Some time ago, I asked on the qmail discussion list if there was the mailing list archive in the standard mbox format, but the answer was negative. Good people on the list at least explained me what I was supposed to do. As the mailing list is hosted on the ezmlm mailing list manager, I needed to pull each and every mail message from it, one by one. At a volume of more than 100000 messages it was very demanding, but eventually I did it.

To save other souls of doing such a daunting task again, I'm putting it all on this page for an easy download (archive splitted by year). Be warned, though, ezmlm did not return RFC822 compliant messages, so all the messages were first processed with a crude perl script which extracted original messages and added missing From_ headers, regenerating timestamps in it from the Date: header. That's the best idea I could come up with. The script is attached below (ezmlm-to-mbox).

I went through all this exercise because I wanted to have the whole archive locally, imported in my XEmacs/Gnus for easy searching. If you got to this page looking for a classic web based mailing list archive, here are some good links for you:

qmail archive at ornl.gov
qmail archive at theaimsgroup.com
qmail archive at gossamer-threads.com

Otherwise, find the archives in the mbox format attached below.

You will need bzip2 utility to uncompress the archives. Later, you can simply concatenate them if you want one large mbox. Have fun!