That's the logical progression of that argument, and is the good reason why obfuscation or even removal of parts is not only a good idea, its a necessity. Exposing raw email addresses in their normal form is real low-hanging fruit.
Regardless of what I think, my clients will cry bloody murder if emails leak out. I had one person recently google their email address, and found a link to an archive file that should have been private. I had removed all links to the archives, but somehow Google found it, indexed it, and the guy threatened me with bloody murder if I didn't take it down. Sheesh.
Bob
---------- Original Message ----------- From: Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> To: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> Cc: mailman-developers@python.org Sent: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:46:01 -0400 Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] Proposed: remove address-obfuscation code from Mailman 3
Something else that occurs to me.
If we accept that obfuscation is worthless and stop doing it, then
there's no reason we shouldn't make the raw mbox files available for anyone to download. Mailman used to do this, but we removed the
feature due to user outcry. Now you can download the gzip monthly .txt files, but they are sanitized. If we stop obfuscating, is there any reason not to make the raw messages available for download?-Barry ------- End of Original Message -------