** Sometime around 23:27 -0400 9/17/98, Glenn Alperin said:

>Vice Sabio wrote:
>
>>I have yet to hear a justification for permitting anyone other than
>>the list owner to access subscription lists in non-closed environments.
>
>I can give you one, and I can tell you how to go about setting it up, as I
>recall having done the last time such a query came up here.

[snip]

>Now, all of this boils down to the fact that people can not get the list
>of addresses by themselves.  However, by the nature of some of our
>discussions, it is often helpful for two or more people to communicate
>amongst each other "off the list" per se, either because they do not wish
>to go over old turf which is extremely familiar to them but perhaps not to
>the rest of the list, or because the appropriateness of their discussions
>are really not for the list anyway.  That said, I do sporadically post the
>list of subscribers to the list itself.
[snip]

Nope, that's not a justification. If anyone needs to contact a specific
list member off the list, he must necessarily *first* know that the other
list member exists. The only way that this happens is if the other list
member has posted to the list -- in which case, he has already voluntarily
revealed his presence on the list, anyway. But on *most* lists, this
represents only about 5 to maybe 20 percent of the subscribers. Thus, you
are "revealing" the addresses of 80 to 95 percent of the subscribers who
would otherwise be anonymous -- and some of those people might prefer to
retain their anonymity.

Now, if you warn people that you do this *before* you subscribe them to
the list, then at least you are giving them the option of not subscribing
(though I still don't see the necessity of posting the addresses of
subscribers who have never posted to the list). However, in that case, I
would argue that you no longer have a "non-closed environment" (see my
initial comment, above).

__________________________________________________________________________
Vince Sabio            Boy & His Sabre: <http://www.insane.net/tsc/Vince/>
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