I'd like to revisit the "Three Questions" at a slightly higher level.
One of the questions was about privacy. Mail-Archive is fundamentally about public, not private information. In general, if it is private, one should not send it to Mail-Archive. For example, email addresses on message bodies are censored not because of privacy but because of practical considerations. We live in a world blighted with spam and it is simply not practical to leave email addresses unshielded. Just like it is not practical leave a bike unlocked on a Boston street for more than about 5 minutes. But what about accessing that public information? Are people tracked when they read something? In aggregate or by individual? For what purpose? How? That's the stuff that usually goes into a website's privacy policy. Here, Mail-Archive is about as squeaky clean as it gets. The basic operating philosophy is the public information stored in the archives is public, and other stuff isn't. The other questions were related to storing data off-shore due to legal considerations. This caught me a little off guard. I don't generally think of the US or Mail-Archive as an "off-shore data haven" for storing material out of the reach of local laws, German or otherwise. The service was not originally conceived of as a political project, but instead as a useful service (and personal technical challenge) and that motive has guided policy. Nonetheless, as things scale up such issues have inevitably surfaced. So far they have been manageable, and in aggregate more educational or entertaining than stressful. The bottom line is that I really don't care if people think of Mail-Archive in different ways. As a free service, though, there are some fairly serious usage gotchas to keep in mind. Most are listed in the FAQ. I generally don't expect to have much, if any, interaction with individual lists except for over the gossip mailing list, although it can happen. If there is an interaction I expect that there will be more or less a single voice rather than 300 people emailing me. And while I try to use good judgement, good policy and knowledge garnered from experience and education [1] there is NO guarantee of service. I think more than 1000 YahooGroups mailing lists were kicked off of Mail-Archive when we banned them a few years ago. In part because dealing with them was a pain. So to take that long answer and put it into a practical response: I'd prefer if messages from [EMAIL PROTECTED] were not tunneled, but will not require it. Nor will I think about it at all unless some problem comes up. I would appreciate it if problems didn't come up at all, but recognize that the future is hard to predict. As for headers in those messages, I only promise that I will use my best good judgement if an issue arises. In the past I've said both "no" and "yes" to revealing header information to select people. For example, I've shown limited headers to a list admin when trying to track down a technical problem. I'd never reveal a header to a spammer, but I might reveal one if asked by someone prosecuting a spammer. In general there is a fairly high bar for me to lift a finger for any sort of special request, headers and not generally available, but I do not consider headers of inbound Mail-Archive messages to be fundamentally off-limits. I do now recognize there is some sensitivity for the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list; quite frankly it never occurred to me that this could even be an issue until it was mentioned. If you are really pushing the envelope and expect push to come to shove, you may want to consider moving to a politically oriented service as opposed to Mail-Archive which is more practically oriented. Mail-Archive belongs to an organization called the California Community Colocation Project (CCCP) which is in turn a member of the Online Policy Group (OPG). It seems that OPG also offers direct list related services, and is not shy about fighting for free speech rights such as they exist in the United States, and probably has a lot more experience with highly controversial clients than Mail-Archive. Here's a few recent choice quotes from David Weekly. "We here at OPG (CCCP) will do all we can to protect our clients' rights, including, in this case, suing firms that try to take your fair use content down." http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0311/S00025.htm http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/business/media/03secure.html "We serve tens of thousands of users with our free mailing lists that otherwise couldn't be hosted elsewhere (we're a "refugee camp" for groups booted from Yahoo! and MSN)." I hope this clarifies the motivations behind Mail-Archive's policies and provides enough information to make intelligent decisions going forward. -Jeff [1] I took "Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier" which despite the hokey title has proven highly relevant. It is basically a cram course so that technical types can have some clue about law. See the MIT OpenCourseWare website <http://ocw.mit.edu> for reading material under class number 6.805J _______________________________________________ Gossip mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
