On May 15, 2009, at 5:04 PM, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:

• Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net:

...

Charles Gregory wrote:

...

Has anyone ever developed a point-n-click tool to delete a message from an archive, preferably by just eliminating the From/To/Subject and body, but leaving the links intact, with a placeholder message that says "message content removed", etc?

Not as far as I know.

It would totally rule. Especially on python.org, where people regret posting their full name because "employers tend to google them", and then come running to us, asking "Please remove my name".

Fucktards.

But I like the idea of such a function.

I've long thought that all archives should be vended dynamically
rather than statically, of course with a cache to improve performance
as necessary. This would allow you to do lots of interesting things,
such as add links dynamically (e.g. "bug 12345" pointing to your bug
tracker), or on-the-fly modification of archive style or anti-spam
obfuscation, with the proper cache invalidation.

This would also allow you to "delete" a message from the archive, by
laying down a marker that causes the program to instead return a "not
available" or cleansed message without affecting the underlying data.

-Barry