Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Mailman archives are often only available in the pretty useless "Gzip'd Text" format, which you cannot easily download and view locally (and threaded) in a MUA such as mutt. But that is exactly what I want to do from time to time (e.g. because I want to read the discussions of the past weeks on mailing lists where I'm newly subscribed).

After some searching I found one way to do it which I stripped down to my needs:

 $ cat mailman2mbox
 #!/usr/bin/perl
 while (<STDIN>) {
   s/^(From:? .*) (at|en) /\1\@/;
   s/^Date: ([A-Z][a-z][a-z]) +([A-Z][a-z][a-z]) +([0-9]+) +([0-9:]+) +([0-9]+)/Date: \1, \3 \2 \5 \4 +0000/; 
   print;
 }

Example run on some random mail archive:

 $ wget http://participatoryculture.org/pipermail/develop/2009-August.txt.gz
 $ gunzip 2009-August.txt.gz
 $ ./mailman2mbox < 2009-August.txt > 2009-August.mbox

You can then view the mbox as usual in mutt:

 $ mutt -f 2009-August.mbox

Suggestions for a simpler method to do this are highly welcome. Maybe some mbox related Debian package already ships with a script to do this?