> >>f course the issue that raises is exposing everyone's email addresses > >>to spammers. There's the old "name AT service DOT com" replacement, > >>but I'm still chewing on that one. > >> > >> > >just remove the mail addresses. simple as that. > > > >(for future archives, take a look at http://www.mail-archive.com) > > > > > http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html#newlist > > *nod* to that. That was going to be my suggestion as well. You can even > forward all the old archives to mail-archive.com, so everything is > available. Once its there, it'll be all good. :-D
Just speaking for Hyperreal, here, Brian Behlendorf has written up our policy about this somewhere. The gist of it is that we are just providing this general service that's not unlike any other of its kind, and there are limits to our liability as far as the public redistribution of messages that get posted. Posting to a public mailing list implies consent to redistribution of your message to the other addresses on the list, and there's no way for any of us to know whether these recipient addresses are human beings with benign intentions, address-harvesting robots working for spammers, or archiving services that may or may not have the intelligence to obscure raw addresses and not misrepresent any content as their own. We have found that spammers can & have scoured our raw archives for email addresses. This has been curbed quite a bit by the simple act of gzipping the mbox files at the end of each month. We're also blocking a lot of HTTP crawlers, but mainly just by IP address and their self-reported User-Agent string, not by any automated means. List admins control their own list archives, so they can further restrict access if they want to, e.g. by setting up password protection or something (though I don't think anyone's actually doing this). We don't care if people set up their own archives, in fact we encourage it, since it's a laborious, resource-hogging process (it triples the size of the archives to pre-generate HTML for every message, invites tons of web traffic as crawlers hit all those pages, and generating threaded index databases can take *weeks* of CPU time) that I've found time & time again is more trouble than it's worth to do for all of our lists, using the tools that are currently available for prettifying archives. If you do set one up, in HTMLized messages, replacing "@" with "@" (or "%40" in a mailto URL) is still surprisingly effective at hiding addresses, so make sure your system at least has this or something comparable. I would also be wary of services like mail-archive.com. For a time, there was a similar free, low-key service that was called FindMail. They subscribed their archiving robot to some of our lists and provided free web interfaces to them. FindMail eventually went commercial and changed its name to eGroups. Then they got bought out and folded into Yahoo. Their service went downhill through this process and now they're using archived messages to sell ads, which I think is of questionable ethics. Food for thought. -Mike
