Anonymous archives

[Pierre Schweitzer]

Hi,

In order to comply with German (and EU to-be) laws, we're looking for an extra feature regarding mailman archives. It would be great that archives (public) could be made anonymous (hidden mail address, for instance). Ideally, when the user logs in to browse archives, then, they wouldn't require to be anonymous.

This is to protect senders regarding privacy leak (and actually regarding spam too).

With my best regards,

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

For Mailman 2.1, you'll have to be satisfied with making the archive private. There are no plans to change this in Mailman 2.1.x. Also, it seems that perhaps more than just hiding the poster's From: address might be required, what about signatures, addresses in message bodies, etc.?

For MM 3, I have added Hyperkitty to the affected projects.

[Pierre Schweitzer (pierre-jean-schweitzer)]

Well, moving the mailing list archives is definitely not a solution for us. These mailing lists are public and their archives are intended to be public, even though a bit anonymous.

You raise a point which is done by other solution: they actually parse the whole message and hide mail addresses when they are found, be it in signature, in body or in headers. This is the kind of solution we'd like to see in mailman and that would fix our solution.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

Just to add a bit to this, the pipermail archive in MM 2.1 consists of static HTML pages. The current archiver by default 'obscures' email addresses everywhere in the archived message, but only by replacing '@' by ' at '. This is for spam harvesting, not privacy, and is probably not very effective.

More secure obfuscation could be done but is problematic in that all addresses would be obfuscated, even those in the body meant to be public such as "send bug reports to <email address hidden>", and the obfuscation would necessarily be irreversable because of the static nature of the pages, i.e. everyone, authenticated or not, would see the same obfuscated address.

(comment applies to MM 2.1 only)