Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> writes:
>> Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 09:54:28 +0200 (CEST) >> From: Angelo Graziosi <angelo...@libero.it> >> >> I noticed that reading the post online >> (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-07/index.html, for >> example), the email address in citation is not substituted with >> "addres@hidden" any more, so would be desirable to avoid email address in >> citation when replaying to an email. >> >> The "address@hidden" starts to disappear between May 26-27 > > The above message was posted today to the emacs-devel mailing list. I > verified that Angelo is factually correct, and that the corresponding > setting of the emacs-devel list still says to make the addresses not > recognizable. > > So why is this happening? > > TIA tldr: Addresses weren't fully hidden and hiding has significant downsides so we turned it off. The setting Eli is referring to is probably obscure_addresses. We don't use Mailman's archiver except for private lists, so it has no effect on public lists as far as I know. But it would have the same problems as our current archiver, which is mharc + mhonarc. There is a setting that can do a decent job of hiding email addresses, that is called anonymous_list in the general Mailman list settings. The help text for it says "Hide the sender of a message, replacing it with the list address (Removes From, Sender and Reply-To fields)." Usually list owners don't set that for a few reasons, including that it's hard to understand who is saying what. The address hiding was never fully hidden, so it mostly just mislead many people into thinking it was hidden while generally failing at preventing spam. For example, https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-07/msg00694.html, which previously would have replaced the address Stefan Monnier <monn...@iro.umontreal.ca> with Stefan Monnier address@hidden, the address could be found by clicking "[Thread Index]" , then clicking "download the archives in mbox format." Then clicking "2020-07", then searching briefly. Or, it could be found by going to the parent message and clicking reply. These features help people who aren't subscribed to reply and read the list. If Stefan didn't add his name to the email and it was just sent as monn...@iro.umontreal.ca, the address would have been replaced with just address@hidden in the html, then its hard to know who is actually being referred to. Some tex syntax and probably other languages use @ in ways that triggers the address@hidden replacement. People have gotten confused and frustrated when reading those messages. And there are many cases where people would really much rather share an email address publicly, for example, they write "please email i...@fsf.org." Another example is this very message. Many other list admins agree about not hiding email addresses. Debian's lists don't obfuscate. Some other guy at w3c wrote about it: https://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/09/11/email_address_obfuscation/ There are general improvements I'd like to make to our list archive software, if anyone wants to help they would be welcome. -- Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7 DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org