Hi,
[Sending to -project@, because this looks like an important
project-wide decision to make, with non-technical implications.
Cc'ing -support@, because current list subscribers might be interested
as well. Please only reply to -project@, and -support@ members can
follow the discussion on -project@ directly, or via... its
public archive.]
Back when we've set up the tails-support@ mailing-list, we've
explicitly decided *not* to have public archives for it. IIRC our
rationale back then was that users may be sending sensitive
information there by mistake, or without realizing that it would stay
online forever. Indeed,
https://tails.boum.org/support/tails-support
reads:
No archive of the content of this mailing list is kept. We believe
this can be help reducing the impact of a posteriori analysis of
sensitive information that might be sent to the list by mistake.
But it appears that we were very naive. That's not at all how the
Internet works. If there's an open and public mailing-list somewhere,
at some point it will be archived somehow. And guess what? It *is*
archived at least twice:
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.tails.user
https://www.mail-archive.com/tails-support@boum.org/
So we're conveying wrong information to current and potential list
subscribers, in a way that may lead them to disclose information that
should be kept hidden.
IMO the only option we have is to acknowledge that a public,
open-membership mailing-list will always end up being publicly
archived, somehow. And then, we must adjust our communication wrt.
that mailing-list so that it doesn't lie.
And once we're there, we can as well enable public archives in our own
Mailman interface, to make it easier for anyone who wants to look into
them to do so... and potentially avoid a few duplicate questions
being asked.
Thoughts, opinions, feelings, concrete proposals?
[OT background: actually, I've been wanting to propose enabling public
archives for that mailing-list for months, for totally unrelated
reasons: too often I'm sure that a question has been answered there
already, but since I'm deleting most email I can't find it anymore.
Only today I've learned about these two existing archives.]
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
