#39: declassification of private mails feature ------------------------+-------------------------- Reporter: misc | Owner: Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: minor | Milestone: Beta version Version: | Keywords: ------------------------+-------------------------- Since HK is a mail archiver, one of my pet peeve is the various usage of private mailing list, and what this implies. While a full ACL system could be nice, I would propre to have a declassification feature.

I have 2 use cases in mind, based on the way i think a community distribution should work. First use case is people contacting a project for security reason. While the content must not be public at first, it could IMHO be made public after a while ( like automated declassification after 6 months ).

Main reasons are : - less interest for a potential attacker since less stuff are marked as private - more transparency on what happen behind closed doors, reducing the conspiracy ideas, and permit to people who would learn how the project react to security issue how stuff happen, even if not in real time. This is rather important for community growing

The second use case is about all the project that have a private board list, to discuss private matters. Here, I would rather see a per thread disclosure feature, after a time. For example, I could see someone either being a disclosure officer, or on demand by a admin.

The same benefit as the 1st proposal, this permit to document the decision of any private group for future reference. But unlike the previous one, this would not be automatic.

A third way to disclose could be to either just disclose the identity of the poster, or just identity and subject. This would permit to show to people ( if they trust the group ) that nothing was discussed for X months, or who was active ( quite important if the group is elected ).

While this is rather high level idea, while redacting this, i think this would be best achieved with a rather complete ACL system, but i fear this is starting to be the sign of feature creep :) ( and i didn't even spoke of having a tool to discuss disclosure ).