I'm trying to solve the following scenario:

- the list is public
- the list has archives
- posters routinely reference previous postings using the URL they get from
either searching or in the daily digest
- each month I want to edit the postings to munge email addresses to
protect them from spambots crawling the archives looking for them
- I may further want to trim some postings (e.g. remove footers) or even
delete some postings

Q: will the URLs survive the notepad edits?  Note that I'm not re-ordering
the messages, but their length may change.

Q: Or, restating the above question, perhaps, what do the parameters to the
following url mean:

http://lists.mydom.com/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0206&L=mylist&D=1&H=1&O=D&P=1409

I'm guessing that:

A2 = the notepad file name, i.e. the archive month/year
L = listname

The others are a mystery to me, though it seems that P is the only
important one.  If I mess with the message lengths in the
archive 'notepad', does P change in value?

In short, what is P and will it stop me doing what I need? Is it a line
offset into the notepad file so as long as I don't delete lines I'm ok, or
a byte offset (I hope not!). Or ???

Any suggestions or comments gratefully received (e.g., perhaps I don't need
to worry about crawlers in the first place as listserv will automatically
throttle and/or otherwise defeat searches by crawlers?).

I've been back and forth through the archives and found lots of good tips,
but no definitive answers.

thx! michael