[SGVLUG] Archives and what you can do about them

[Emerson, Tom]

Although not an officially sanctioned standard, in many cases you can add your OWN header to a message to prevent the contents from being archived.  This is particularly true for /newsgroups/, and may be true for /e-mail lists/ [still researching as I write this...]

In particular, the header  "X-No-Archive: yes" will prevent deja news [later bought by Google] from keeping a copy.  Deja news was absolute, Google lets the post remain for 6 days before destroying it [I presume the brief archival allows for people reading entirely via google to have some continuity in discussions]  This page explains in detail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-No-Archive

OK, more research done -- it appears Mailman [which we're using now] DOES honor the "X-No-Archive" flag as well as the (sanctioned?) "X-Archive" flag:

http://www.list.org/mailman-member/node40.html

which states in part:
=============================
  *  List archives 

     O  The list administrator can choose for the archives to be public, viewable only to members (private), or completely unavailable. 

     O  The HTML archives which are created by Pipermail (the archiving program which comes default with Mailman) contain only obscured addresses. Other archiving programs are available and can do different levels of obfuscation to make addresses less readable.

     O  If you wish to be more sure, you can set the mail header ``X-No-archive: yes'' and Mailman will not archive your posts. Similarly, you can set the mail header ``X-Archive: no'' to disable archiving.

 
Warning: This does not stop other members from quoting your posts, possibly even including your email address. 

=============================

Note in particular that warning at the bottom -- despite your best efforts, someone else may ignore your wishes anyway...


Tom

p.s. -- there is a downside to this as discussed here (in the "off-topic rant" part of his message)

http://www.faqs.org/faq-maintainers/mail-archive/2002/May/0034.html

but that occured in a rather more public forum than our little e-mail list...