[Mailman-Users] publically available .mbox files in pipermail archives

[Jon Carnes]

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 11:21, Bruno Postle wrote:
> I've been made-aware that as well as indexing pipermail public html
> archives, google indexes all the raw mbox files too:
> 
>      http://www.google.com/search?q=pipermail+mbox+X-Mailman-Version
> 
> These are also a resource for email-address harvesters, so I've
> configured apache to redirect these requests to the private
> archives:
> 
>     RedirectMatch permanent ^/pipermail/(.+)\.mbox/(.+)\.mbox$ http://example.com/mailman/private/$1.mbox/$2.mbox
> 
> Can anyone see anything wrong with this approach?
> 
> ..or should mailman be modified to allow only authenticated user
> access to the mbox archives?

I like your way of doing it. That should work fine.

I run a script against my mbox file nightly (and the html pages) which
scans for specific email addresses and substitutes a specific
replacement for that email address - all this provided by users who
don't want their addresses showing up in the archives. 

It was a nice add-on feature and easy to do.  The names and
substitutions are stored in a simple database; the script is a simple
"for... done" that executes a sed statement for the substitutions. 
Since I run it nightly, it's pretty fast.  It would also be fairly easy
to add this to the Pipermail archiver.  On some of my lists I run
Pipermail, on others I run Mhonarc, so I haven't bothered to integrate
it.

Jon Carnes