Your people unexpectedly published my e-mails

Your people unexpectedly published my e-mails

[Mike Ainley]

Sirs,

Some time ago I sent an e-mail to gcc@gnu.org to do with being unable to 
access the site using MSIE 5 on Windows 98, being directed to the spam bot 
page.

The message was answered by James Wilson.

The message has been uploaded to your web space, which I did not expect to 
happen, since I simply sent an e-mail message using my ordinary e-mail 
program. No one has ever put an e-mail of mine on their web space before!

I am writing to ask that you make an exception to your usual policy, please 
would you either delete the message or else remove my e-mail address, as I 
am now receiving spam. I had avoided spam *entirely* for several years 
until this happened. It is important to me because of the way I depend on 
my internet account.

Remember, I did not place the message on your web space, nor did I want or 
expect it to happen, it was your people that did it (how would you feel if 
I uploaded *your* messages to *my* web space?) moreover  ** I was unable to 
read your policy in any case ** because I was unable to access the site in 
a meaningful way. In any case, I would have expected to have to send the 
message via my browser for it to appear. (which was impossible anyway 
because of the spambot page problem)

Incidentally, if you wish to receive e-mails without the problem of having 
the addresses harvested by robots, you may wish to consider using a system 
similar to my ISP, which allows this without having to divulge the e-mail 
addresses. Visit http://www.cassetta.freeserve.co.uk/e-mail/email.htm and 
have a look. Not an address anywhere, neither on the page nor in the code!

The following are the url's indicated by Google when searching for my 
e-mail address:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-08/msg00857.html

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-09/msg00033.html

Thank you for your attention. You will see that I have altered my 
Auto-Signature as a result of this experience!

Regards, Mike Ainley.

auto signature:
Please do not publish this message
Please do not publish my e-mail address
http://www.cassetta.freeserve.co.uk
Huddersfield, G.B.
  

Re: Your people unexpectedly published my e-mails

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

Hi -

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 04:26:56PM +0100, Mike Ainley wrote:

> Some time ago I sent an e-mail to gcc@gnu.org [...]  The message has
> been uploaded to your web space, which I did not expect to happen,
> since I simply sent an e-mail message using my ordinary e-mail
> program. No one has ever put an e-mail of mine on their web space
> before!  [...]

Many public mailing lists have been archived to the web as a matter of
course for a long time.  The GCC mailing lists, being broadcast to
hundreds of developers/users, have had this automatic archiving
operate for probably five years or more.  I am sorry that you haven't
encountered this before, but it really is routine nowadays.

> I am writing to ask that you make an exception to your usual policy,
> please would you either delete the message or else remove my e-mail
> address, as I am now receiving spam. [...]

While I sympathize, your email has already gone out to hundreds of
readers, many search engines, many other archiving sites, so removing
it from gcc.gnu.org would simply be futile.

> [...]
> auto signature:
> Please do not publish this message
> Please do not publish my e-mail address

I suspect that such trailers have as little practical impact as
dreadful automatically appended corporate disclaimers/notices.  You
may have luck with the "X-No-Archive" email header or its kin, but
realize that the moment you send mail to a public spot, you are really
talking to the whole world.

- FChE