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On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, Richard Masoner wrote:
> Have any other owners of archived lists had similar requests to remove
> archived email?
I run several lists, all of them archived, and I have to say that
yes I've been approached to alter the archives by various subscribers.
I've received several such requests over the years that I've run
my lists, and I've only as yet allowed one such change. Most of the time,
I politely tell them that they agreed to the archival of their messages
when they read the letter of introduction and stayed zubscribed to the
list. There was one case where I agreed to make the alteration, however.
I run an internet-based fan club for fans of PJ Harvey. At one
point, her management decided to join the mailing list to listen in on her
fans' conversations anonymously. Said management wanted to send me a
press release one day, and being new to the internet, they sent it to the
list instead, giving everyone on the list a copy of a personal letter to
me containing a bit of "tell them it's official, but not who it's from"
information.
I quickly informed them of their mistake, and told them the
ramifications (loss of their anonymity on the list, et cetera). They
politely thanked me for informing me of their mistake, and asked if I
could alter the logged copy so that at least for people who didn't save
the message at their end, the anonymity would be protected. After
considering this at fair length, I went ahead and altered the archives,
removing any indentifying information from that one message (putting in
xxx@xxx for email, xxx.xxx for hostname, removal of signature, et cetera).
In retrospect, I'd make the same decision today -- there would have been
negative repurcussions for the site had I not taken care to attempt
recovery of their anonymity, and we wouldn't have the same relationship
with those people that we have now. Sure, we broke our own rules, but the
site has benefitted from that transgression...
Jason
# "Jason A. Dour" <jad@bcc.louisville.edu>
# Programmer Analyst II; Department of Radiation Oncology; Univ. of Lou.
# Finger for URLs, PGP public key, geek code, PJ Harvey info, et cetera.
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