[Mailman-Users] Harvesting of email addresses for spamfromarchives

[David Beaumont]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:mark at msapiro.net] 
> The META tags say don't 'index' the index pages themselves, but follow
> the links to the messages, and on the message pages 'index' the
> contents, but don't follow links.
> 
> This is appropriate for a public archive. Presumably you want 
> people to
> be able to search for and find stuff in a public archive.
> 
Yes I understand the metatag.  What we want is no emails available to the
public where our members email address can easily be worked out.  We achieve
this very well through Nabble and their archive of our mail -
www.bargeforum.org.  We have never found the mailman archives very user
friendly, quite basic in fact.  So in this case we want nofollow and
noindex.  The public can search our public Nabble archives as much as they
want.

> If the archive is private, it can only be accessed by logging in. The
> 'pipermail' URL doesn't work and access is via the 'private' CGI which
> requires login with list member email address and password.
> 
> It won't change the META tags, but they will be irrelevant 
> since robots
> can't log in and access the pages.
> 
> Email obfuscation has nothing to do with public/private. 

Thanks for explaining that, it was my only concern about going private.  The
mailman help is not clear on this and I had not noticed the move to a
passworded directory because every time I changed to private I had to be
already logged in to make the change.  Now logging in, making the change,
logging out and testing has made it clear how it works.  The great thing
about mailman is support like this. But as our archive gets bigger and more
useful, mailman's basic interface does fall shorter and shorter. 

Thanks

David