[Spambayes] online information

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 21:40, Jesse Pelton wrote:
> Please see the following discussions about the public nature of postings
> to the SpamBayes mailing list (and other such lists):
>
> http://www.nabble.com/Mail-archive-----Please-delete-td1777509.html
> http://www.nabble.com/asking-to-delete-a-message-td7074218.html
>
> Sometimes the best thing to do is keep mum. It's possible that raising
> the question will stimulate interest in the posting.

I for one would never have looked at this particular email, if it weren't
for the email that Heidi sent. She even was so nice to send a direct url
to the message, which in turn will be indexed too by Google et al.

In my humble opinion, the "private" data looks very uninteresting.
Anyway the mailing list description clearly states:

"Please note that this is a public mailing list: all messages sent to this
list are visible to the public, and are publicly archived."
Source: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes

This page is linked at the bottom of every email posted to the list.

Not only are the emails publicly archived, they are also privately
archived by the hundreds of people who are subscribed to the list.


What Heidi or her boss are actually asking, in terms of "old media", is
the following:
A reader sends a letter to the editor of a newspaper. The newspaper
publishes and prints the email in their next edition. Thousands of people
buy the newspaper the next day and read it. Then, after a week, the person
who wrote the letter wants to recall it. He asks the editor to take back
the letter, and to retrieve all newspapers that were printed with the
letter.

Is this situation any different from the current request? I don't think
so. The only thing that changed is that paper was replaced by electrons.

-- 
Amedee