Dear XXX,
Sebastien requested to have his e-mail address retroactively hidden in
the archives.
I do not quote your message because I wish that Sebastien reads my
response too and you had not cc'ed him.
As both of you can see, your addresses are hidden, by writing to myself
with Bcc's to both of you.
I definitely agree on point 1.
The mail address is also (and even first) stored at www.linmodems.org
and I know that Russ (Webmaster) thinks exactly as you for point 1 and
as me for all the rest including your point 1, a known etiquette rule
for such discussion lists where ANONYMITY is incompatible with
DISCUSSION. This was his (rightly blunt) reaction the first time such a
request was posted.
About point 2.
As you can guess, this was not the first request of that kind. I did it
two or three times only, years ago, because the price tag had been a
full day of work each, and the result not quite satisfactory.
Unfortunately your suggestion does not work, because the address is
present in the index too and address grabbers do not miss it.
Look at this:
[phep2] /var/www/html/linmodems/archive-fourth > grep seb3214 *
maillist.html:<UL><LI><EM>From</EM>: SEB2003
<seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx></LI></UL>
msg02792.html:<LINK REV="made" HREF="mailto:seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx";>
msg02792.html:<LI><em>From</em>: SEB2003 <<A
HREF="mailto:seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx";>seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx</A>></LI>
msg02792.html:<LI><em>Reply-To</em>: <A
HREF="mailto:seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx";>seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx</A></LI>
msg02795.html:<LI><em>To</em>: SEB2003 <<A
HREF="mailto:seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx";>seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx</A>></LI>
[phep2] /var/www/html/linmodems/archive-fourth > grep seb3214 ./.*
./.mhonarc.db:'1096740961 2792','SEB2003 <seb3214@xxxxxxxxxx>',
[phep2] /var/www/html/linmodems/archive-fourth >
Neither maillist.html nor .mhonarc.db can be edited by hand without
corrupting all the indexing system (see Glimpse below) and destroying
message threading.
Thus a complete rebuild is required.
This first means hand-editing of a file where mails were accumulated
during one year, to follow your suggestion of masking the address with
matching XXX's.
Using sed to do it automatically is ruled out because of possible
partial matches. Imagine what would happen if the archive contained a
message from useb3214@xxxxxxxxxx , or, very much more likely, an "in
body" quote by someone of his original message.
Then I have to run MHonArc again on the edited accumulator. The scheme
for assigning an ID number (such as msg02792.html for example) used by
MHonArc is such (unfortunately verified) that the ordering obtained in a
one-shot run performed now differs from the ordering by accumulation of
daily crons for a small but not null number of messages (over one year)
which arrived in the mailbox while the cron update was in process, thus
messing up cross referencing by number by later messages.
Finally, the indexing by Glimpse too has to be redone, editing is not
possible, because for efficient indexing all the information is hashed,
so I cannot locate seb3214 in the tables!
This is, in lengthy detail, why Sebastien's request cannot be handled.
Obviously, the authors of such requests do not have the slightest idea
of their implications ...
Jacques
