Every month or two the following happens. Someone does a Google search on their email address, sees a five-year-stale Google search summary and panics. We had a very light obfuscation technique back then, which you don't notice unless you look hard. Anyway, the point is lots of people are very concerned about spam, and I worry that putting up unobfuscated addresses on select lists will open the floodgates. By open the flood gates I mean lots of frantic, confused people calling me up in the middle of the night for the next ten years. I really hate that.
So, The Mail Archive does blatent obfuscation with two goals. One is to prevent harvesting, the other is to keep users happy. If a list admin wants to bypass this, one approach is to put some very light obfuscation in on messages before they hit the archival service (perhaps apply at the list server). This requires some technical wizardry but I'm sure there are people on gossip capable of doing it. The other way is to have a really compelling reason why your list should have obfuscation turned off or modified. Enough to justify the risk of people calling me in the middle of the night, and complicating our migration path if we need to change obfuscation techniques some day. It's hard for me to think of a compelling enough scenario. -Jeff PS. I really hate spammers. _______________________________________________ Discussion list for The Mail Archive Gossip@jab.org http://jab.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
