[vox-tech] X-No-Archive Inheritance?

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 06:37:23AM -0700, p@dirac.org wrote:
> On Fri 17 Oct 03,  4:00 AM, Ryan Castellucci <ryan+lugod@cal.net> said:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> > 
> > If I post a message with 'X-No-Archive: Yes' will replys also not be 
> > archived?
>  
> unfortunately not.  two things:
> 
> 1. we COULD search the body for X-No-Archive, so if someone quoted your
>    email, your wishes would be respected.
> 
>    it wouldn't be perfect.  what if they trimmed that line?  it would
>    depend on a quoting system using ">".  you couldn't post an email
>    with a lines like /^X-No-Archive.*/.

Trimmed? X-No-Archive is supposed to be a header, right? I wouldn't
expect that to show up in the quoting message at all.

> 2. but you may also ask "so what?".  it's a public forum.  you
>    shouldn't expect posts not to be archived.
> 
> if you have an idea how to implement a threadful X-No-Archive, and it's
> either easy to implement or you want to implement it yourself, then i'm
> all for it.
> 
> just realize that X-No-Archive is like copy protection.  the responder
> can bypass any system we institute.

Yeah, but I think the scenario he wishes to avoid would be:

  1. Alice posts potentially sensitive information to list, setting
     X-No-Archive.

  2. Bob posts a response, which includes a quote containing said
     information; but either doesn't realize the information may be
     sensitive, or forgets to set X-No-Archive.

Maybe the first 5 "Bobs" remember: but it only takes one accidental
forgetting to post it for the world to see. It's far from the ideal,
which would be that if a "Bob" would have to *explicitly* enable
archiving from such a response if that's really what he means.

One implementation which would seem to work well would be for a filter
to check the headers to all messages in the "References" header; and
if it found X-No-Archive, keep the response unarchived also. This is
not trivial to implement though (but not too difficult, either), and I
don't think I care quite enough to spend time on it. :-(

-Micah