For the meantime, I'm going to have to recommend not doing this (see my notes below for why).

There definitely must be another open-source mailing list manager, written after the stone age. (Kicks the dead horse: you wouldn't find this mail in the archives, for some reason - mailman ignores me :( ).

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 04:36:21PM +0400, Max Semenik wrote: Mailman is quite nice, actually. It's *pipermail* that sucks.. I gather it merely doesn't suck *enough* to get someone motivated to replace it. Cheers, -- jra --

Max Semenik wrote:

> Mailman has problems, too. Yes, I can believe that pipermail fails to > publish my emails although they are properly saved to the database, > but mailman also fails to send me back a copy of my messages despite > checked "Receive > your own posts to the > list" in preferences. (Sending this from Gmail web interface instead > of The Bat! to check if my problems are related to it).

I'm afraid you're blaming the wrong victim here; I just checked the mail server logs, and they show that the corresponding copy of your message was delivered to Google mail servers at 17:35:21 UTC, roughly two minutes after your message had been received by Mailman.

Michael Bimmler wrote: Yeah, it doesn't work as well as advertised. For the meantime, I'm going to have to recommend not doing this (see my notes below for why). As you note, it's already possible to search via third-party archives. It would probably not be difficult to replace the broken htdig search form with a link to a nice offsite archive, though. Because: a) The current mailman/pipermail system makes it a *huge* pain in the butt to remove mails from archives on request b) I got tired of the volume of requests to remove mails from archives, with the consequent time required in handling them c) With the wildly popular wikimedia.org domain out of the running, third-party list archives aren't as visible in general search engine results d) Therefore, the volume of requests go down e) and I don't feel bad turning down most of the remaining requests. If and when mailman's archiving system is fixed up to make it quick & easy to take a mail out of archives (eg, *not* involving shutting down all mail processing, rebuilding an entire list's archives since 2001, and discovering that all the links are now broken because mailman's internal behavior has changed in the intervening years and it splits up messages differently), then I'll be happy to pop us back into general search engine indexes. That'd be c) above. -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

2008/4/28 Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>om>: People occasionally slip up horribly. But almost all requests for message removal I've *ever* seen are specious.

As for the search - we have lots of experience with that rather nice Lucene search thing. Can anything usable be done with that on mail.wikimedia.org without crippling the box?

Well, I think there's a point where it goes from being a dick to just not bending over backwards to comply with unreasonable requests. I think this is a case of the latter. Mark 2008/4/28 Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > > David Gerard wrote: > > 2008/4/28 Mark Williamson

> > > >> My general view on this is that if somebody sends an e-mail, that is > >> their problem. If they don't want their employer to find it, they > >> should have thought of that before they sent it. > > > > > > People occasionally slip up horribly. But almost all requests for > > message removal I've *ever* seen are specious. > > Most requests go like this: > > "I sent a mail to the list (accidentally instead of offlist /

> about my default work email signature) and it includes my (real name / > private phone number / address) which I don't want on the internet, can > you please remove it from the archives so it's not the top Google hit > forever?" > > We may scoff and roll our eyes and say "If you don't want it on Google, > don't post it on a public list!" but the point is they *didn't* intend > to publish it. Refusing to remove them on principle violates the "don't > be a dick" rule, from which all other ethical principles can be > logically derived. > > So, I'm stuck at refusing to remove them most of the time because it's

> very disruptive operation, and doing annoying things to the search to > reduce the "Google signature" of the mails still floating in the

> >

With a click, the email left for the general mailing list. The student realized immediately the error and called the IT admin on the spot. The IT admin succeeded to clean the mailboxes of about 1/3 of the list...