[Mailman-Developers] Proposed: remove address-obfuscation code from Mailman 3

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry Warsaw writes:

  > 2) 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.

 > 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 at 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.