On Jul 2, 2009, at 6:10 AM, Chauncey Wilson wrote:
It would be useful to be able to choose whether you wanted something archived or not. I'm on another group where we don't archive any of the conversations (people can of course, save copies) to encourage more freedom of speech and less concern over the issues we've been discussing. Of course, some people disagree with the no-archive policy, but overall, it seems to work and the policy is clearly spelled out when you join. That approach is more like a conversation where you are not being recorded the entire time.
It's a falsity that the group that doesn't archive is somehow more free to have conversations that this group, which does archive.
As a member of that group, you never know who else is on the list. You don't know who is saving messages or who might forward them to someone else. (The group has a policy that you not supposed to forward, but there's no way to enforce it.)
So, even in a group which doesn't archive, you can't assure the sender that a client/colleague/manager or someone else won't see the email.
In my opinion, it would be detrimental to the long-term social value of this group to have a choice of archiving. If you gave the choice on individual messages, then threads would be sporadic (not to mention the problem of quoting unarchived messages in archived responses). If you gave the choice on entire threads, then important information would be missing, making the value of the archives unreliable.
The reality is that once you press the SEND button in any email, that message is then broadcast to hundreds of computers, logged, and archived on systems you don't even know exist. (For Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, many US corporations now log every incoming and outgoing message.)
So, if you don't want someone to see your thoughts, don't put them in an email. Period.
My $0.02. Jared Jared M. Spool User Interface Engineering 510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845 e: [email protected] p: +1 978 327 5561 http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: @jmspool ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
