Before L-SOFT allowed message deletion from the web interface, I found myself
having to deal with subscribers who wanted their messages deleted.

In all but a few cases, I always said no, explaining that it was time-consuming
and exacting work.

The exceptions I made usually involved revealing a famous person's email
address or some similar betrayal of security.

Because eliminating an entire message would upset the message count, I chose
to remove the text but not the headers, substituting phases like "message
deleted" in the headers.

Something else to think about:  once the messages go into the archive, the
information is (in many cases) more valuable as a database than as a record
of conversations among subscribers.  In such cases, it can be more
efficient to edit messages, reducing quoted material, or "me too" kinds of
messages, allowing for more efficient indexing.  (I used to do this
systematically with a list and found that I could reduce the file size by at
least a third.)


Bob Kosovsky, Ph.D. -- Curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
blog:  http://www.nypl.org/blog/author/44   Twitter: @kos2
   Listowner: OPERA-L ; SMT-TALK ; SMT-ANNOUNCE ; SoundForge-users
--- My opinions do not necessarily represent those of my institutions ---