On Aug 25, 2009, at 8:30 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
- is more interesting. What kinds of uses are we talking about?
You see a message in an archive from three years ago and you want to contact the OP about it? Why not just follow up and contact the mailing list?For all the reasons why Reply-To Munging Considered Harmful.
What I'm thinking is that there should be a "send me this message"
link in the archive, which gets you a copy as it was originally sent
to the list. That let's you jump into a conversation as if you'd been
there originally.
Something like this would be cool for another reason. Assuming you
could trust the long term storage at the archive site (enough) it
would eliminate the last reason why I locally archive any public
mailing list messages.
Do you want to be contacted off-list for on-list topics? Well,
things like an email forwarding service could solve that, although I think it's not worth the effort as much as the first use case. What other kinds of legitimate third party uses does obfuscation/concealment prevent?Obfuscation is a minor annoyance, but concealment is problematic in cases where the email is the identity, eg, matching list posts to issue tracker IDs.
For example, I signed up for and log in to Launchpad as "stephen@xemacs.org", but I have to tell bzr that my ID is "stephen-xemacs". Wow, that's transparent. But at least it's guessable. Getting from "Stephen J. Turnbull <email concealed>" to "stephen-xemacs" is not going to be easy if you don't already know me.
True. -Barry