[Imc-tech] Re: fiscal sponsorship and request to remove e-mail from public mailing lists

[Zachary C. Miller]

I just had a conversation with a Green who had some concerns about our
public email archives and Sascha just forwarded me some concerns about
our archives also, and I've heard other people express concerns. Most
concerns lie in the fact that searching google for someone's name
tends to bring up their lists.groogroo.com posts in the
archives. People realize that email isn't private but still balk at
the searchability. Having public archives is VERY important to me as a
matter of transparency. However, after thinking about it a lot I
thought that with so many concerns abounding about the archives being
on google maybe it really would be a good idea to switch all or most
of our lists over to being "member only". Effectively that would mean
that still anyone in the world could join the list and read the
archives, they could in fact even join the list and mark their account
for "no mail" so they don't receive listmail.

Heck we could even set up a "guest" account with a trivial password
that we advertise right on the listinfo page. Then anyone visiting the
listinfo page could login easily to read the archives.

With the archives behind a password barrier they would eventually work
their way out of google and out of the google cache. It would take
months but it would happen eventually.

Another thing I could do instead (slightly less effective) would be to
put in a robots.txt file asking crawlers to not index our
archives. This would only be advisory and some crawlers might index
anyway.

Of course one benefit to having radical political materials being in
google's cache is that no one can erase the record of our existence by
taking down our server.

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet - Ya Basta!
 Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
 Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology