[Mailman-Users] Complaint: My E-mail address appears on this site without my permission

[Christopher P. Lindsey]

> on a site in plain text, because it'll stop the harvesters. Third, 
> use robots.txt to make sure the global spiders don't search and index 
> your archives -- if you need search capability, run a site-specific, 
> private one. Don't allow your mail archives into global databases 
> where you lose control of it.

There are some other controls that you can exact based on the Browser
ID of harvesters, too:

   http://mosa.unity.ncsu.edu/~brabec/antispam.html

You can also switch to an external archiver such as MHonArc, which 
can obfuscate addresses for you:

   http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/resources/spammode.html

> Archives are a public record. I don't edit them or remove messages, 
> any more than a newspaper can unpublish an article in a newspaper. 
> But -- that doesn't mean you don't have some responsibility to 
> protect those archives from abuse, but anyone who posts anywhere to 
> anything on the net is at some risk -- you can manage those risks, 
> and should, but the guy can't make the post unhappen, and I consider 
> removal of non-libelous data from an archive unacceptable.

I agree.  You're also in a dangerous legal position if you start modifying
your archives -- you'll then be responsible for *all* content.

Chris