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Sorry for the confusion of speakers in my post--it was Roger who made the point that we may be thinking too hard or overmuch about the archive question. And he may well be right, but until everyone's had a chance to air his/her own thoughts on the matter, it would be a shame to discourage discussion or to leave misinformation in circulation while people are still weighing the arguments pro and con. David Birc's understanding of the two-year limit on our archives turns out to derive from Mailbase's intention to keep them for only that long after our move to Jiscmail, which is why John arranged to have them follow us here instead. It's premature to say what relationship there may have been (if any) between the Sircam attacks via attachments to Brit-Po and other list posts (but no Petc ones as far as I know) that members of both lists received and the relative accessibility of only a few private-list archives served by Jiscmail at that point (when our own were still public too) or whether the prior and relatively modest Haptime attack was related to the Sircam one. It appears that the infected attachments spread via the back channels, though, and I was certainly impressed by my inability to penetrate Jiscmail's firewalls with the Sircam sample they asked me to send them. But who knows what occurred with their hundreds of other lists or where their own investigation of these viral attacks stands at the moment, so there's not much point in speculating about the specifics. Nobody's pressuring us to keep our archives closed anyway, much less trying to instill fears to stampede us. The most Jiscmail's done is to advise us on the basis of what their other private lists are electing to do with their own advertising, archives, and other server services. Candice on 8/11/01 5:23 PM, [log in to unmask] at [log in to unmask] wrote: > My point is that whatever attacks we have suffered have very little to do > with the issue of the archives. The sircam virus has nothing to do with > it at all, and is a much more general problem which is just a matter of > being in cyberspace at all. > > Erminia, there is a copyright policy already in place for emails on the > archives, as we retain copyright and moral rights for anything we say > here. > > Yes, we are all agreed that they should remain closed for the meantime. > I am not saying we shouldn't think too hard about keeping them closed, > rather the reverse! It's easy to adopt the going thing; I think we > should not, for reasons which I hope I've made clear. > > Best wishes > > Alison