[Leica] on archiving

[Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>]

Every message ever sent to leica-users is and will be available on mejac's
archive. It's an ftp archive and not a web archive, so it doesn't show
up in Alta Vista and such, but it's always been there. You can access
it through majordomo and so can everybody else.

These other archives were in fact done without my knowledge, or, as far
as I know, the knowledge of anybody else on the list. Of the 7 years
that the Leica-Users list has existed, there were about 2 years when I
didn't really read it, so it could have been discussed then.

There are 787 subscribers to the Leica list. This past week we learned
that one of them has been really an archiving service and not a human.
And that that archiving service happens to look at the words NO ARCHIVE.
Do we know that one of the other 786 is not an archiving service? Do we
know that the words NO ARCHIVE really work? What happens if Alta Vista
starts indexing my ftp archives?

Many of the 786 people who receive this message will store it on hard
disks and zip disks and tape backups, perhaps to be dredged up years
later.

Folks, if you send a message to a large public mailing list, it is
going to be stored forever whether you like it or not, and whether you
put the words NO ARCHIVE in it or not.  Let's not get silly about
whether something is or isn't archived, because if you send it to 787
people, the chances of all of them deleting it is completely zero.

Brian Reid