Google Group Archiver

This is a small tool to create a HTML archiver for an existing Google Group, which can import existing mails and update new mails regularly.

Dependencies:

• Python 2
• GNU Mailman
• Gmail

Install

1. Prepare Group Subscriber

• Create a Gmail account (do not use a precious password)
• Subscribe to your Google Group
• Create a filter that matches "to:(listname@googlegroups)" and label it with your listname (no whitespace please)

2. Download History Mails

• python migrate.py
• choose "d" to download from YOUR Gmail account
• choose "m" to convert box format to mbox format
• (You can use any other E-mail client to download mbox)

3. Setup Mailman

• Install GNU Mailman
• Apply the patches if you like (see below).
• Create a new list in Mailman (listname should be exactly the same, while admin mail and password do not matter): /usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist
• Import history mails: /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch listname history-mbox-file

4. Setup Crontab

• Modify cron.sh script, set variables LISTS, EMAIL and PASSWORD
• Add crontab to a user with mailman permissions (e.g. root) which runs cron.sh every 15 minutes: */15 * * * * /absolute/path/to/cron.sh

5. Setup Web Server

• Nginx for example:

location /pipermail { alias /var/lib/mailman/archives/public; autoindex on; }

Patch for Mailman

Modifications made to Mailman (modified files are given in their entirety):

• GBK handling: HyperArch.py => /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py
• Remove unused HTML elements: template => /var/lib/mailman/templates/en/

If you modified the templates, HTMLs have to be rebuilt:

• /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch --wipe listname history-mbox-file
• python migrate.py to convert listname-full.box (containing all mails received by cron.sh) to mbox format
• /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch listname listname-full.mbox