> > 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.