Back on Dec 27, Daniel Garcia <kender@hollyfeld.org> wrote,
> I am not sure if people on this list are aware yet, there is a company out
> there called Findmail (www.findmail.com) that has a bot that is subscribing
> itself to all the mailing lists that it can find, and making permanent
> archives of those mailing lists.
>
> When this bot subscribes to the list it gives no indication to the list,
> and if you don't pay attention to subscription notices, you will never even
> notice that it has started archiving your list. The name it subscribes with
> is ListSaver-of-listname@vault.findmail.com . . .
Checking this out here, I immediately found a list owner who said
findmail.com had sent a subscribe message *and* a message to her as
the list owner telling her they were subscribing, why, and that she
could tell them not to. She did tell them not to, and they replied
that they were removing the messages they had received in the few days
they'd been subscribed.
I'd still question the analogy findmail.com makes on their homepage
between searching for mailing lists and searching for web pages, since
traditionally lists have been kept private by obscurity: if it's not
announced anywhere, it's not public, even if subscription is not
restricted by the software. Inevitably others will do something like
what findmail.com does, even just to compile a list of lists without
subscribing, so list owners are going to have to pay more attention
to the noadvertise option and to whether subscription should be open.
Joseph Brennan Postmaster Academic Information Systems
Columbia University in the City of New York
postmaster@columbia.edu
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