Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Email address no more hidden

[Ian Kelling]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 09:54:28 +0200 (CEST)
>> From: Angelo Graziosi <angelo.g0@libero.it>
>> 
>> I noticed that reading the post online 
>> (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-07/index.html, for 
>> example), the email address in citation is not substituted with 
>> "addres@hidden" any more, so would be desirable to avoid email address in 
>> citation when replaying to an email.
>> 
>> The "address@hidden" starts to disappear between May 26-27
>
> The above message was posted today to the emacs-devel mailing list.  I
> verified that Angelo is factually correct, and that the corresponding
> setting of the emacs-devel list still says to make the addresses not
> recognizable.
>
> So why is this happening?
>
> TIA

tldr: Addresses weren't fully hidden and hiding has significant
downsides so we turned it off.

The setting Eli is referring to is probably obscure_addresses. We don't
use Mailman's archiver except for private lists, so it has no effect on
public lists as far as I know. But it would have the same problems as
our current archiver, which is mharc + mhonarc. There is a setting that
can do a decent job of hiding email addresses, that is called
anonymous_list in the general Mailman list settings. The help text for
it says "Hide the sender of a message, replacing it with the list
address (Removes From, Sender and Reply-To fields)." Usually list owners
don't set that for a few reasons, including that it's hard to understand
who is saying what.

The address hiding was never fully hidden, so it mostly just mislead
many people into thinking it was hidden while generally failing at
preventing spam. For example,
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-07/msg00694.html,
which previously would have replaced the address Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> with Stefan Monnier address@hidden, the
address could be found by clicking "[Thread Index]" , then clicking
"download the archives in mbox format." Then clicking "2020-07", then
searching briefly. Or, it could be found by going to the parent message
and clicking reply. These features help people who aren't subscribed to
reply and read the list.

If Stefan didn't add his name to the email and it was just sent as
monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, the address would have been replaced with just
address@hidden in the html, then its hard to know who is actually being
referred to.

Some tex syntax and probably other languages use @ in ways that triggers
the address@hidden replacement. People have gotten confused and
frustrated when reading those messages. And there are many cases where
people would really much rather share an email address publicly, for
example, they write "please email iank@fsf.org." Another example is this
very message.

Many other list admins agree about not hiding email addresses. Debian's
lists don't obfuscate. Some other guy at w3c wrote about it:
https://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/09/11/email_address_obfuscation/

There are general improvements I'd like to make to our list archive
software, if anyone wants to help they would be welcome.

--
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org