Hi all, With the number of times people have contacted Debian (via debian-www@, listarchives@, and BTS) to complain about their email addresses being published in the archives, I was thinking that this disclaimer should be updated:
http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/disclaimer Specifically, "in accordance with the United States law" could be changed to "[...US] law and possibly laws of other countries", and the sentence "All mails sent to any of our mailing lists ..." could be followed by something like this: When updating the archives with new mail, sender email addresses are _not_ removed, obfuscated or disguised; despite legitimate concerns raised individuals about their email addresses being 'harvested' for use in Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), it is the opinion of the archive maintainers that the benefit of being able to directly contact the author of any particular posting outweighs the harvesting and bulk email problems. If you are genuinely concerned about the publication of your email address in the Debian archives, consider using a short-term email address via SpamGourmet[1] or making use of email filters such as Spamassassin[2] and Vipul's Razor[3] on your mail server. The issue has been discussed many times in various mailing lists; please check the archives thoroughly before filing a bug or beginning a new thread on a list about this topic. It's probably also worth mentioning, somewhere, that any individual or entity that subscribes to a Debian mailing list can archive the list and publish it: so even if Debian were to change their archival policy, there would still be Geocrawler (is that still alive?), MARC, Google, and any private mail-to-news gateways and web archives. And having mentioned that dreaded word (policy, not Geocrawler): is any of the stuff on that disclaimer page actually part of Debian Policy? Should it be? Andrew. [1] http://www.spamgourmet.com/ [2] http://packages.debian.org/spamassassin [3] http://packages.debian.org/razor -- Andrew Shugg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.neep.com.au/ "Just remember, Mr Fawlty, there's always someone worse off than yourself." "Is there? Well I'd like to meet him. I could do with a good laugh."
