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> If you could explain the nature of these emails and why you would > not want them archived, perhaps you would get a sympathetic hearing. Yes, of course. We are friends. We are talking about written words, carrying the name of the author. These written words are being archived, indexed and re-published. The legal owner of copyrighted material (as any author is, unless a legal transfer has occurred) is the only legally-entitled distributor of any such material. By subscribing to a mailing list, a person is pretty far from transfering the copyrights of any posted material. Mailing lists (non-commercial, as Debian is) are in fact a forum of friends. Archiving, indexing and allowing re-publication of this material by other sites is now going *well beyond* the mere posting of an email to a list of friends. > ... spend several hours tracking down this material (including any > quotations thereof by other people) and I'm not entirely certain > that's a good use of our time ... I agree. I propose a very simple solution: to archive and index emails as usual, as far as the date of these emails is no older than six (6) months. This is also in line with the need for our mailing lists to allow other friends to benefit from our local discussions. This is also beneficial in term of resources, as it avoids web-engines to overload our servers by reading gigabytes of text... Let me also repeat that the information on those messages is obsolete, as there is no gain in a 1999 message on a piece of code that no longer exists! For example, what is the gain with the kernel mailing list to still post my old email on DVD-RAM? That code is now in the kernel, in a very different form, and there is no single person on earth that would care retrieving that old message. So, why is that Excite and AltaVista and friends keep having a link to that message? I tell you why: because that message is still there on the net, Excite is scanning the net for useful pages, the net is full of garbage, so Excite etc are now listing a lot of garbage. Talking about time, how long does it take searching between 17789323223 entries of such garbage to find a good recent page? I am sure that by archiving and indexing 6 months old messages only, all of the above problems will disappear overnight. Did we ever do spring cleaning? And if we really want to keep all the garbage, let us keep it somewhere else, in a corner, and let forbid web engines to go through it, OK? With good peace of the dead letters! --
