Anyone using this list, or any other mailing list, or email in general, should be cognizant of what they're doing. It's not possible to fully defend people from their own carelessness -- nor should we try, as this invariably penalizes the clueful.
In this particular context, that means that users should (a) use a sensible mail client (MUA, Mail User Agent) that presents the "To:" "Cc:" and "Bcc:" fields and makes them available for editing and (b) take the few seconds required to eyeball those and make sure they're appropriate before sending. It's not that I don't support the principle of least munging, because I do -- and I do that because a lot of experience, some of it painful, has proven it wise. But in practice, it doesn't matter to me personally because I've developed the habit of doing (a) and (b) with every message I ever send, mailing list or not. It's a good habit to have, and I *highly* recommend it -- particularly for anyone who might suffer adverse consequences as a result of a misdirected mail message. My other recommendation would be that anyone in that situation subscribe themselves from an alternate address (perhaps a throwaway at some freemail site or another) and funnel the resulting mail stream back to their main email account via fetchmail/procmail or similar plumbing. Inadvertent exposure of an address like a9n3vx8v3t8zbf...@example.com will pose a bit less risk. Now, as to: > Again, pending that decision, I recommend that the configuration be > returned to its default setting. The default is known to be safe. It would be nice if it were that simple...but it's not. Once upon a time, when we were using a much smaller set of MUAs it might have been, because they were, for the most part, written to spec and crafted to Play Nice with each other. However, today, we have a plethora of MUAs, many of them thrown together haphazardly with no regard for either formal specifications as articulated in the relevant RFCs, or many decades of best practices/netiquette. (Note, for example, how many MUAs encourage users to top-post and full-quote, both of which are not only very rude, but are worst practices in effective, efficient email communication.) This situation has gotten markedly worse over the past few years with the rise of mobile devices and the corresponding increase in the number of MUAs: the behavior of some MUAs on those ranges from questionable to dubious to wrong to full-blown batshit insane. Alternate version: even if the list does everything right, it can be and probably will be neatly undercut by the horribly-broken WhizBangMail 0.37, which, as you're reading this, some developer is about to release and somebody on this list will install on their device tomorrow. Thus: there is no such thing as "safe" in this context. There are too many moving parts and some of those parts are human beings. ---rsk -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
