[Mailman-Developers] MM3 - Using fqdn in the exposed URLs

[Richard Wackerbarth]

Are we making a design mistake?

The current design of the Postorius and Hyperkitty web interfaces to the mailing list and its archives uses the fully qualified list submission email address as a component of the URLs presented to the public.

Is this really a good idea?  Just think of the exposure that search engines, etc. will give to these email addresses. I fear that doing this will create an even greater invitation to those who harvest email addresses for the purpose of spamming and other nefarious reasons.

Additionally, in the most common usage case, it makes the URL significantly longer than it needs to be. In most cases, the website address determines the email domain of the associated lists. Only a few websites are serving mailing lists from multiple email domains. Those sites would need to have some mechanism to unambiguiously identify the list being referenced. But for most sites, the common name of the list is sufficient.

One of the design principles of Django is that the website designer can present his content by way of URLs of his choosing.

Presenting the actual email address of a list may "leak" information that the user wishes to obscure.

I think that we should rethink this decision and follow a "slug" approach to the identification of the mailing lists in URLs. Those who choose to do so can use the fqdn as their slug. But others would be able to readily change the mapping without having to rewrite significant parts of the interface code.

Comments?