One suggestion for importing old archives: let LISTSERV do the work for you!
In other words, create a dummy list with a huge daily-threshold and all the
acknowledgement stuff turned off. Then write a script to burst your foreign
archives into individual emails and send each one on to your dummy list.
LISTSERV happily processes them and creats a new notebook formatted to its
liking. The original dates on the posts are not altered. If the dummy list
has a different name then you can globally change it after the new archives
are created.
I have done this successfully with literaly thousands of posts from old
non-LISTSERV archives. The exact method of getting your burst posts to
LISTSERV without adding any new To:/From: etc. headers is probably the
tricky part. I did this on VM where it is trivial but I can't imagine
it's much more difficult with any other system. And compatibility of the
new archives is guaranteed :-)
--
Bill Gruber
City University of New York