[Mailman-Developers] Support for X-No-Archive

[Andrew Daviel]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2015, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Only because it already has, except for the RFC, and
>
>    http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/ietf-mail-attributes.html
>
> mentions the definition of "X-No-Archive: Yes".

Thanks. Amazing. I assumed that it had expired with Usenet.

I found it implemented in
/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToArchive.py, viz.
     # Common practice seems to favor "X-No-Archive: yes".  No other value for
     # this header seems to make sense, so we'll just test for it's presence.
     # I'm keeping "X-Archive: no" for backwards compatibility.
     if msg.has_key('x-no-archive') or msg.get('x-archive', '').lower() == 'no':
         return

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-No-Archive says
"If the X-No-Archive field is set to "No", or the field is absent, a 
Usenet archive will not recognize a prohibition on archiving the message."

Experimentally, if I add "X-No-Archive: no" in Alpine or Thunderbird, 
pipermail will not archive the message, while if I add just 
"X-No-Archive:" to my custom headers, both programs will suppress the 
empty header so that mailman will archive the message.

(double negatives are confusing, I know)

I found http://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers in wikipedia
which explains how to add a custom header in Thunderbird, though the 
"easy" way seemed to not exist anymore, at least I could not find it.

GMane has a different X-Archive syntax, per http://gmane.org/expiry.php
viz. X-Archive: expiry=7
http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html specifies "X-No-Archive: yes"


I've updated the wikipedia page for fun.

-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376  (Pacific Time)