Debian's mailing list disclaimer
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 <andrew@neep.com.au> 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."
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