[Mailman-Developers] public archives and email adresses

[Thomas Wouters]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 03:30:52PM +0100, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote:

> If I have public archives and a member of the list has a signature in their 
> email reader, this signature is included in the archive. But - at least in my 
> list - it is quite common for signatures to include the posters email adress 
> which therefore are being made accesible on a public webpage.

> Is it possible to strip messages of the signature before they are being 
> archived? If so - how?

No, you can't really do that. The problem is that you can't see where
signatures start. Sure, sane people use the correct signature marker ('-- ',
as I have below) so you can detect the start of signatures, but that's not
all. Some mailers put quoted text below the signature, so if they used a
proper signature marker you would end up removing the entire quoted mail.
And what to think of people who accidentily put
-- 
somewhere in their email ? The rest of the email would vanish :) And then
there's the problem of people inserting email addresses in other locations
in the email -- almost as frequent as adding them to your signature. All in
all, it's a better idea to post-process the archives to try and detect and
mangle email addresses (but half-heartedly; Barry knows how hard it is to
detect all possible email addresses :)

But I don't think Mailman currently has any of that. The latter part could
be added, for sure, but it would require going over each email before or
during archiving. Also note that I've not followed Mailman development in a
while, so I may be horribly wrong, sorry. :)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!