Seeking feedback on changing visibility of email addresses in the list archives

[Ian Kelling]

The current situation: The original email addresses of each message has
always been available in the mbox archives, which are linked to in each
html thread listing. In the html view: anything like x@y in the body is
replaced with address@hidden and in the headers, "Name <x@y>" is
replaced with "Name", and people who just send as x@y become
address@hidden.

I think we should stop doing this. Some reasons:

It makes it harder to email people and reply to the sender and identify
who said what and to who.

In the body, whenever someone intentionally types an email address, it
tends to cause problems. Some examples: this message itself will be hard
to understand. Patches with x@y in them are unexpectedly messed up.

The spam situation has changed. html scraping of addresses was a major
source of spam long ago, its not anymore. Filters are better, spammers
can get the address from the mbox anyways and most people's address are
known to spammers already.

There's precedent: Debian doesn't. Some w3c guy wrote an article about
why it shouldn't be done
https://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/09/11/email_address_obfuscation/

Making public lists simpler and easier to use is beneficial at this
point when most people are unfamiliar with them and opt for
alternatives.

-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org