Re: Publicly available mbox archives of debian mailing lists + Bug#161440
On 10:26 Thu 28 Apr , Martin Mewes wrote:
> Hello,
>
> alexeijh@westnet.com.au wrote :
>
> > It would be really handy to have archives of the debian mailing lists
> > available as mbox archives.
>
> http://mbox.mewes.tv/ exists :-)
Great! This is exactly the kind of thing I'm after. Probably the
month-by-month approach is most beneficial to me. I do think that it's a
pity that this doesn't exist for before Nov-2004 [not your fault Martin,
just making a general point].
If it is decided not to have mbox archives, I think it is important to
have this stated on a page somewhere on debian.org along with the reason
why. I hadn't thought of the spam issue, and just had assumed that
no-one thought it a useful thing to do.
So basically, the main reason debian doesn't do this is so it isn't used
by spammers to gather email addresses[?]
A few questions/thoughts:
* Is it really that more difficult to crawl through html archives than
mboxes? I realize to crawl through a mbox is trivial, but I don't think
that crawling through the html would be that more difficult and presumably
spammers already have a certain degree of skill in doing this. It would
also be pretty trivial to subscribe to a bunch of lists and get mail
addresses that way.
* Interesting to note that some other open-source projects do have mbox
archives: gnome and ubuntu for example.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/
http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel.mbox/
It would be interesting to know if they have difficulties associated with having
mbox archives.
* Having the current months mbox archive allows user to download, put
~/Mail or wherever and *then* subscribe to list. This means you don't
receiving Re:SomeSubject emails that you don't have the parent to.
* Having a lists entire ML as mbox archive is really handy to new
contributor to list/project. E.G. Someone takes over as release
manager. They could have a look at entire debian-release mails to get
upto speed and to learn the necessary history. Of course you could
check out the html archives, but we all now it's much quicker reading
mail in your mailing app, and you can do a lot more powerful searches,
etc.
The above is just my 2 cents. I don't really understand the technical
spam details, but I thought it would be handy for you all to know some
ways that this feature would be a good thing.
Lex.
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