[Mailman-Developers] From the creation of a ThreadID

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 2:53 PM, David Jeske <davidj at gmail.com> wrote:

> Perhaps I misunderstood. If you are going to have a record of the deletion
> (i.e. you can keep a deleted message around in some form), this problem
> becomes much easier.

In practice, complete deletion is occasionally necessary.  The
archives should be robust to that.

> Absolutly if there is a message 'deletion' feature, it should delete the
> message contents but leave a 'stub' that links the message-id and
> references/in-reply-to, so it can help hold the thread together during a
> rebuild.

If a message is actually a referencable member of a thread, there will
be references to it in other messages.  Only in the (increasingly
rare) case of a thread held together only by In-Reply-Tos will the
thread be cut by removing a message; otherwise the reference headers
are enough to rebuild.

I think it's reasonable to leave a stub whose only content is "This
message was administratively removed" plus the References, Message-ID,
and Date header fields.  I don't know what to do about the required
>From field, but since it's not going out on the wire in a certain
technical sense the RFC doesn't apply.  Alternatively, use 'From: "J.
Redacted User" <anonymous at example.com>".  The only real problem I can
see with this is that third parties who see it may go searching
personal archives for a local copy of the offending message, which
goes against the spirit of deletion -- better to pretend the message
was never publicly posted.