> > are strong legal reasons to not want archives for some closed, private > > lists to stay around forever. The Microsoft case is just the most > > recent example of stored email being used against its owner in court. > > Remember however - Colonel North got strung up based on PROFS notes > recovered *from backup tapes*. Also, on most systems, deleted files > are merely freed, not actually cleared, allowing disk scavenging. Yes, but you can easily control how long your backups are kept. > It is *well* outside Listserv's responsibilty to impose security > policy on unwanted archives. In fact, under most Unix systems, > the 'listserv' userid should *NOT* have the system access privileges > needed to truly do this correctly. (For instance, under AIX, using > the "compressed file system", you can't even re-write the file > and be sure of re-writing the same blocks. If your patterns compress > differently, different disk blocks may be allocated - you need to > actually grovel around in the inodes and find the allocations and > write to the raw disk - a scary prospect indeed). All I'm asking is that LISTSERV delete the files. Anything more is outside its scope. > That's overlooking the fact that they can still subpoena the files > out of the recipient's message stores - I know *I* have some mail > that dates back to 1986 or so.... Maybe so, but that's not my responsibility as manager of the LISTSERV system. I have lots of old mail around too, but I don't save every message.