mail archives (was: Another ACPI anecdote, plus footnotes)

[Bill McGonigle]

On Jan 24, 2005, at 12:48, Kevin D. Clark wrote:

> Some folks on this list are *very* concerned with their email
> addresses appearing on a web-accessible archive (they don't want to
> give anything to the spammers).  I share this concern, although I
> think that there are folks on this list who are more adamant about
> this than I am.  I am more interested in making the collective wisdom
> of this list available for others to gain from.  Still, any mail
> archive should have an email-address obfuscating feature, in order to
> satisfy this (reasonable) request.

This appears to be the main stumbling block.  Mailman has an e-mail 
address obfuscation feature but it's very sad ('user at domain').  If I 
were writing a harvester I think I'd throw in the 1-line regex to fix 
these so it's not really a worthwhile countermeasure.  I'm looking at 
what it would take to have Mailman just remove the e-mail address 
(display only the 'real name') or only show the user-part if there's no 
'real name' provided so the offer is DOA unless I get that fixed.

Removing X-No-Archive messages should be a 10-line formail/procmail 
script, but if anyone has one done please send it along.

The trouble with the password-protected archives is that they don't add 
to the general knowledge-base of the 'net.  There's alot of great 
content from lots of smart folks here and it's a shame not to share it.

I'm curious - is there anyone here who expects total privacy with the 
address they use to post here?  If I were a spammer I'd subscribe to 
every list I could find via mailman,et.al. interfaces; we don't 
validate lurkers here, right?  I'm not arguing for showing the 
addresses in the archive at all - just asking if there's a witness 
protection program expectation here, that is if having your 'real name' 
but not your e-mail address exposed to the Internet would cause a 
problem.  I'm ignoring the mail-archive.com archive for the sake of the 
academic question.

-Bill
-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
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