James G. Sack (jim) wrote: > Gus Wirth wrote: >>.. >> Although you are correct in that the lists are a public forum, it is >> evident that we do try to do some minimal obfuscation to protect e-mail >> addresses. Evidently, the list manager doesn't look in the subject line >> since that's not an obvious place to look. > > That's the main point I was groping with. I need to study English, some day. > > I note that the obfuscation of archived messages seem to have improved > recently (since September). I also just verified that subject lines are > NOT modified in the archives, as of today.
So mailman doesn't obfuscate email addresses in subject lines. I don't think we can help Helge. She was complaining in September last year about wiki spamming. We solved that by changing the entire site over to plone. Then we found that allowing people to authenticate themselves, also allowed to wiki spammers to do their magic. So we shut off self authentication for a while, cleaned out the crap and waited. Now we turned back on subscription, but it requires admin authorization to complete. We're doing what we can. I suppose we could restrict access to the archives. That would disallow Google indexing, among other effects. I did a search on Helge's email in google and we are the only place it shows up. I even checked whois and apparently Austria doesn't include email addresses in their whois records. So now we can all understand why Helge is so upset. On the other hand I have 8 pages of listings in google with my email address and it shows up in probably a dozen whois records. >> However, I don't think that retroactively going back and changing things >> is a good idea. The possibility of hosing history outweighs any insignificant advantage to Helge. If she is on some spammer's list then >> I feel her pain, but deleting our archives isn't going to remove her >> from their lists. I wonder if she puts as much effort i> > Regards, > ..jim > > -- > [email protected] > http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-steer > nto tracking >> down >> the bad guys. > > I would agree that it's unreasonable to attempt to fix or delete old archives. My question still stands: could we [in the future] do > something about subject lines in our archives? Some of the archives are in html, and some are in mbox format. It's not a trivial thing to got through the archives and obfuscate email addresses in subject line. Especially since we split the archives on a monthly basis. If we make them private then we can't get google to search them. I guess we have to balance the escape of Helge's email address against the usefulness of indexed archives. Helge may just have to deal, his/her address is in the internet and unfortunately there's nothing he/she can do about it. -- Neil Schneider pacneil_at_linuxgeek_dot_net http://www.paccomp.com Key fingerprint = 67F0 E493 FCC0 0A8C 769B 8209 32D7 1DB1 8460 C47D A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain. - Mark Twain -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-steer
