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David Gerard wrote:
2008/4/28 Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com:
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 / forgetting 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 a very disruptive operation, and doing annoying things to the search to reduce the "Google signature" of the mails still floating in the archive.
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?
Hypothetically, if someone develops it (or can find an existing patch to mailman).
- -- brion