Thus spake "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <froomkin@law.miami.edu> > I have just run into an example of this (POISSON) when I was unable to > find the archive. I was surprised -- and puzzled. Surely the storage > costs for archiving ALL IETF lists, especially in their spamless form, > can't be that great? What sort of volume are we talking about ? Depends on the list; the main IETF list is over 1.5MB/mo in my personal archives. Given that the WG lists are maintained by volunteers, it would be a significant cost to provide several years of archives out of the list maintainer's pocket, especially when you add in the trolls and spam which are not part of the list's relevant content. > > 2. The volume of spam in a bounced-messages archive would quickly > > change your mind. > > Here, you could well be right. But would that have to be held beyond the > life of the group? If you consider the bounced messages to be legitimate content worth archiving, then their archive should be kept as long as the non-bounced archive. > > 3. All of this would be easily solved by someone (e.g. IETF secretariat) > > providing list service for all WGs with a consistent policy. > > Agree. But I'd like to also suggest that part of this policy is keeping > the (unspammed) archives around, if only for the sake of people (like > me) who try sometimes to write the history of decision-making in some > of these areas. I agree. I've petitioned several times for centralized lists and archives, and have even offerred to provide them free to all WGs, but so far the IESG has taken no action. My guess is there's nobody we all trust to be such a central manager -- right now one of the IESG members is being accused of list mismanagement. S