I'm setting up htdig search integration for the mailing lists; once that's working, list archives for all remaining lists will be forbidden from robots.txt.
This should hopefully cut down on requests to remove items from the list archives due to someone's name showing up on Google from posting a message to a public list.
I don't understand. Why don't you just remove the e-mail addresses from the archives? You've now rendered Google useless for searching the mailing lists, and I'm sure you know that nothing else achieves its level of usefulness...
I'm not sure it's the email address that's the problem.
If I recall correctly, at least one of the requests was from someone ("user-A") who used their real name and their Wikipedia username together (just once) in an email to one of the mailing lists.
This then allowed another Wikipedia user ("user-B"), who had developed a grudge against user-A, and who had been blocked on the Wikipedia, to use Google to find the real name of user-A, whereas previously they only knew their username.
User-B then posted on their personal web site various things attacking user-A, using user-A's real name. As a result, someone googling user-A's name would get various results, some of which were effectively slandering user-A.
User-A was then able to use various legal avenues to get user-B to remove this stuff from their website.
However, user-A also requested that the particular message (which allowed the connection between their Wikipedia name & their real name) be deleted from the mailing list archives (or made so that no search engine would index it), to try and prevent the same thing ever happening to them again.
There may be other reasons too, but at least in this case, it wasn't the email address that was the issue, rather it was the mailing list serving as username <--> real name lookup table.
All the best, Nick.