Q02: Where does all of the content on archives come from?

A: The short answer is, it comes from the community at large. Most of what is kept on the site are simply messages from popular (public) mailing lists. If you click on the icon you will find information about the home sites of the various mailing list sources.

Q03: What is the purpose of archives?

A: Our original intent was simply to collect mailing lists that we regularly use, and put them in one place - one place that wasn't going to dry up like many of the sites we've used in the past. Archives has obviously grown into a larger repository, but the idea is still the same. Our goal is to have a complete, unchanging historical record of all information, and to keep it free and accessible for as long as possible.

Q04: How is archives funded?

A: Archives is owned and operated by the members of the Neohapsis research team. Neohapsis has been kind enough to pick up the tab.

Q05: Who is Neohapsis?

A: Neohapsis is an information security research and consulting firm based in Chicago, IL (US). See www.neohapsis.com.

Q06: Does Neohapsis own the content on archives?

A: No - in most cases, the original author owns the content, though by posting to automatic-distribution lists, they have obviously 'licensed' it for reasonably expectable distribution by those channels and for archiving in the extant archives (much like the Google archive of Usenet).

Q07: How much money are you making off of the archives?

A: None. In fact, archives.neohapsis.com operates at a loss: the server hardware and the bandwidth (which is a notable amount of traffic!) is an expense that Neohapsis bears. You'll note that there aren't any annoying banner ads, cookies, or other shenanigans found on the site. We do not offset our costs by advertising, nor do we plan to. The intent is not to profit. See Q3.

Q08: Will archives be here for a while, or will it dry up like most mirror sites?

A: Archives will be here for quite some time if we have anything to say about it!

Q09: How can I contact the maintainers of archives?

A: The easiest thing to do is to drop us an e-mail at webmaster@neohapsis.com.

Q10: Pages on the archives site are clearly labelled 'copyright.' Is Neohapsis claiming copyright on the email posts?

A: Absolutely not. Only portions of the page are copyright Neohapsis (and certainly not the original content) -- our copyright is in the "look and feel" of the site. If you view the HTML source, you will see HTML comments which indicate which portions are copyright Neohapsis, and which portions are copyright the original sender.

Q11: I found a posted message that is inaccurate, how can I correct it?

A: The best thing to do is contact the maintainer of the relevant list. Archives is simply a collection of those lists - we don't control their content. If you post a correction to the list, then that correction will wind up on the archive as well -- just like a newspaper correction. One doesn't go back and edit yesterday's paper archive, even for 'online' papers -- that would be a dishonest misrepresentation of history.

Q12: Can you modify/delete a post I made?

A: No. Our policy is to not modify/delete posts without a legal order to do so. Just like a newspaper, we are happy to archive and thus display any correction you send to any list. We are merely a repository of the historical record of those lists. Modifying any of that content (which we do not own!) opens up a ton of legal and ethical issues -- how do we even know you are the originator of the post? It should also be noted that most of the lists archived here are also archived elsewhere - we are but one of many. Removing posts from our site does not decrease the exposure caused by the numerous other mail archives on the Internet which host these very same lists. Finally, the site is maintained in our spare time. Removing/modifying posts takes time. Since it is not a revenue source, should the cost of maintenance increase, chances are we would have to bring the site down - a route we would prefer not to go.

Q13: [x] hacked my site, I did a search on [x], and found this site - did you guys hack me?

A: Short answer: no, absolutely not, we did not hack you. We are not in the business of hacking people. At least not without written legal permission, anyway. :) Kidding aside, chances are a search engine such as Google indexed some content on one of the mailing lists we archive.

Q14: Your site is giving email addresses to spammers!

A: This is an unfortunate, forseeable consequence of posting messages to public forums. That said, we do make a best effort to curb abuse. We specifically obfuscate all email addresses to keep them from being recognized by spammers. This approach is inline with standard industry practice--for example: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?q=about. In addition, we take some above-the-norm steps to block address-culling spiders (note: that does not include Google and other legitimate search engines, which we allow).

Q15: How can I keep my email from being archived on your site?

A: The appropriate solution is to not post a message to a public mailing list, if you do not want it archived by anyone. However, the Neohapsis archives does honor the 'X-no-archive: yes' email header. Any message which includes this header will not be included in the archive.

Q16: How come PGP/GPG signatures come up as invalid?

A: The content of incoming email is slightly modified as it goes through the archiving process (conversion to HTML, reformatting, etc). Since the content is modified, the PGP/GPG signature verification will fail.

Q17: Do you modify the email messages?

A: In general, no. Whitespace is translated into HTML entities, since HTML has special treatment of whitespace. All '@' characters are also graphically encoded, due to our anti-address-harvesting protection. This may affect inline content (code examples, etc). Message attachments are not modified in any way.

Q18: The information in an old post is out of date, can you update it?

A: We realize information changes over time, and that information (particularly contact information and URLs in signatures) gets out of date; however, we are maintaining a historical archive, and not an up-to-date personal information index. Information that was correct at the time it was posted will not be updated. If it was incorrect at the time of posting, then please issue a correction to the mailing list in question, and it will eventually find its way into our archives.

Q19: How come [some archive] is empty?

A: There are many reasons why an archive would contain no messages. The most common reason is because it was recently rotated, and no new messages have been received--so it remains empty until the first message arrives to generate the index. Less common reasons include the vendor dropping our subscription address from the list, or the vendor discontinuing the list entirely.

Q20: How come some messages wind up in the wrong date archive?

A: Occasionally the rotation process will be slightly delayed, causing posts from the first few days of the new month to wind up in the previous archive. For example, it is possible that posts from May 1st wind up in the April archive for any particular list. Also, messages are placed in date archives based on the time they are received, and not the date/time indicated by the sender. If a sender has the incorrect date set, it may cause the post to appear to be in the wrong date archive.

For portions of this site: © Copyright 2006, Neohapsis, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Questions, comments or feedback, send E-mail to webmasterneohapsis.com