lots of spam on libstdc++ list now

[Jason Molenda]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2002 at 10:45:33AM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, Benjamin Kosnik wrote:
> > Any thoughts about deleting the previous spam posts (links sent in
> > earlier email)?
> 
> That's quite tough, technically, without changing URLs for the web archive
> or having two copies of the web archive (old and new), as far as I know.

Actually, mhonarc makes this pretty straightforward (speaking only
of the mhonarc internal links, not any external links that might be
pointing to them.)

We generally treat web archives as sacrosanct - if it was on the list,
it is in the archives.  As soon as we start picking things for deletion,
we get net users who sent a note to, oh say, cygwin@sources.redhat.com
unaware of the fact that their e-mail address would be sent to a thousand
people and would be archived in a dozen places.  Then they complain.
Or say a Red Hat internal engineer sends some confidential information
to a list @sources.redhat.com, unable to remember that this is an external
mailing list, and requests come in to make that note not exist.  It's
a losing battle to even try to cover up like this, and I think the best
policy is to ignore all such requests.  (but of course my opinion is
really without weight; this is all just my opinion)

Beyond the principled reasons, though, this -

> (In principle I agree that removing messages which *without doubt* are
> spam would be nice, but the effort -- who has the capacity to do that?
> -- and risk might be too high.)

Is the best point, IMHO.  It's just spam, it won't cause anyone's
eyes to explode if they see it in the archives, we all know what
it looks like, no one is going to send their bank account numbers
to someone in Nigeria.  mhonarc cleverly defangs the HTML in these
spam notes so they can't cause mischief for the unwary.  Unless
it's really outstripping valid list traffic, it'll just be lost in
the noise.

J