Shai asked me to issue a public apology: I am sorry, if my email could be interpreted as accusation about his intentional wrong doing. As I already explained, it was not my intention. Alone the title of the email should have made it clear, errors happen (without malice).
What I meant in my posting titled: "P1619: Errors happen" is the following: 1. I asked Jim to let someone edit the emails in the reflector, to remove email addresses. 2. There were 3 posts on the reflector, which contained my email address in the body, that is, not in quoted headers, which did not happen before. About the same time I started to receive so much spam, which made my email almost unusable. 3. If an archive contains email addresses, it provides a simple way (through spam) to silence somebody in an email reflector; therefore, it is a serious issue to be fixed urgently. I did not say it has happened! 4. This mistake in the archive software proves that errors do arise in real world systems, even if their designers cannot be accused with not knowing what they are doing. They are professionals, and so we cannot assume average users would do better. (This was in reference to our earlier discussion: should we do anything to prevent some innocent user errors or not?) 5. A polite request, formulated as a question to install a filter to blind email addresses in the reflector. This reflector is mirrored in several places, and so an un-blinded email address has a very large exposure. Other places, where our email address might appear are not nearly as bad. I have not noticed what Serge pointed out, that the current email archiving software does not even blind addresses in quoted emails. This was a surprise, because some other email archival software handles this properly for years. Accordingly, the increase of spam might not be related to quoting my email address in the email body, but a coincidence. Laszlo
