Emendations to mhonarc.db

["Iain Brown" <iain@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have been using MHonArc successfully now for a year or so, and
have processed nearly 10,000 messages for a mailing list I run. I
have been looking at the mailing list archives recently, and I
have discovered that some messages (about 100) have a Subject line
group identifier which has not been filtered out by my resource
file -- for example, (sideline) which is not caught and stripped
out like [sideline] is.

I would like to remove these stray identifiers, *without*
reprocessing all 10,000 messages (as they have all been indexed
using PHPDig), and *without* changing any message numbering. I am
interested in correcting only the date and thread HTML files, and
as these are generated automatically by MHonArc, any changes made
by hand to the files would of course be lost.

I know one is not meant to edit the mhonarc.db file without due
care and caution. But if I were to (gasp!), and then ran MHonArc
to add in some more messages, what would be the outcome? Would the
date and thread HTML files be rebuilt with my revised Subject
lines and with the existing message numbers?

Or is there a better way of correcting the database?