Lost Mailing List Data

At exactly 23:17 CET on September 16th 2005 - a malicious user deleted all existing mailing list info and all lists of then currently subscribed users. He did this vicious act by exploiting a security hole in the twiki installation we have on the same server that hosts the curl mailing lists (cool.haxx.se). Lots of other data was erased as well but that did fortunately not affect this project.

With the hole fixed, we restored backups only to discover that we had messed up and hadn't actually backed up the mailing lists at all.

In order to minimize the damage, I wrote up a script that scanned the logs of subscribe requests and recent postings to the mailing lists and imported these lists to the appropriate mailing lists.

This had several immediate side-effects:

1. people who haven't posted nor subscribed recently were lost completely
2. some people that had already unsubscribed wrongly got re-added
3. everyone got a new password set for the membership on the list (and thus for their preference edits etc)

Still, we got several hundred legitimate subscribers back this way. We just have to bear the initial flood of people sending 'unsubscribe' request to the list (against all sense and knowledge).

The mailing list archives weren't affected. They are even hosted on a different server.