[ale] Webcrawlers can harvest ALE Archive E-mail Addresses

Geoffrey esoteric at 3times25.net
Thu Feb 10 07:30:01 EST 2005


James Sumners wrote:
> The way I understand it is that if an email contains the header
> "X-no-archive: yes" then MHonArc will not archive the email thus
> preventing it from showing up on the web archive.
> 
> Of course, that would not prevent the email from showing in a message
> reply (e.g. Jim Popovitch's email will show in my reply).

Right.

> It seems to
> me that it would not be very difficult for the archiver to obfuscate,
> or completely remove, the email address from the From line in the web
> archive.

We've really been over this.  There is a positive point to having the 
address in the archive, that is, reasonable people who are searching the 
archive for assistance have the opportunity to email the poster directly.

Really, please see the archives for this discussion.

> I went to MHonArc's web page to see if it supports such a
> thing and the closest I was able to find was the support of the
> X-no-archive header. I must agree that it would be extremely
> beneficial if the archiver would rip email address from the From field
> before archiving but I also don't maintain the list.

And at this point, everyone would have to change their email address 
once that was done.  The horse is already gone, no sense in closing the 
barn door.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey



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