Re: [NTLK] Did anyone else get this?

From: Victor Rehorst (victor_at_newtontalk.net)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 13:25:56 EDT


Glen Warner wrote:
> I guess this is more of a question for Victor, but wouldn't a 'bot be
> defeated by adding the meta tag "no bots" to the header of the
> message? ... or adding appropriate headers via JavaScript's 'docwrite'
> command ...?

List archiving is done by MARC, a free service provided by a very generous
company. They host archives for thousands of lists and process hundreds of
thousands of e-mail messages a month.

On their 'About' page at (http://marc.10east.com/?q=about), they list what
they do to protect privacy and fight spam. This is an excerpt.

-----------------------------------
Some notes about privacy

We have developed a bad attitude about spam over the years and we know we are
not the only ones. We take steps to respect people's privacy and to try to
minimize the usefulness of our site to would-be spammers gathering email
addresses.

First of all, we respect the 'x-no-archive' mail header ala DejaNews -- if
your mail message includes a 'x-no-archive: yes' header it will be dropped
from our feed, to respect the wishes of list members who wish to keep their
posts private. Please email us if you find a message in our database posted by
you with the 'x-no-archive' header set. (Note to list admins: the ezmlm list
management software gratuitously adds 'X-No-Archive: yes' to every mail that
passes through the list by default. It's not possible to tell if the mail was
originally sent with that header set or not. That'll prevent any ezmlm'd
message from appearing in MARC, until/unless the default list config is
changed by an administrator.)

Second, any database view that includes multiple messages (viewing threads,
browsing lists, or browsing the results of a search) will show only the real
name of the sender, or, failing that, the username of the sender with the
@domain.com stripped. So, index pages cannot be pulled and parsed by
address-trolling robots. Such a robot would have to pull every individual
message to obtain a list of addresses. This is a step rarely taken, as far as
we can tell, by other archive maintainers. [Note that more recently, other
archives have started not only doing this, but stripping the names and
addresses off of posts entirely. That starts to get into some sticky copyright
issues--by removing attribution entirely you are no longer giving credit where
credit is due--so it's a difficult balance. That's an easy step for
list-admins to take themselves--they "own" the contents of their lists--but
since we're a third party and don't have the explicit or implicit permission
of each poster to remove their attributions, we can't do that.]
----------------------------------

-- 
Victor Rehorst - victor_at_newtontalk.net - chuma_at_chuma.org
NewtonTalk list administrator - http://www.newtontalk.net
Will help you with your list problems - as long as you're nice.

-- Read the List FAQ/Etiquette: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Read the Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ This is the NewtonTalk mailing list - http://www.newtontalk.net/



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