Version 1 (modified by 13 years ago) ( diff ) | ,
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redacting messages in mailman archives
https://lists.mayfirst.org/ runs mailman. Sometimes information gets posted to a mailman list that should not be public. Once private information is posted, it has already been leaked. But people may want to redact information from our publicly-accessible archives or from follow-on list digest mailings, etc. We should do this sparingly, and only with good reason (e.g. someone posting someone else's private information to a publicly archived list).
This page contains information on how an MF/PL administrator can redact messages from a mailman archive to avoid further exposure. It does not solve the problem that the data has already leaked.
Connect to leslie.mayfirst.org and switch to the mailman user:
ssh -t root@leslie.mayfirst.org su - list
FIXME: can we lock these files so that mailman doesn't clobber them while we edit? This could be risky on a high-traffic list.
Assuming that the message has just recently been sent, edit both the pending digest mail and the current archive:
cd /var/lib/mailman $EDITOR archives/private/$listname.mbox/$listname.mbox lists/$listname/digest.mbox
Things to watch out for when editing these files:
- avoid removal of entire messages, since that will screw up the public-facing URLs. You may just replace the message body with a body that says "message redacted", for example.
- If you are doing significant surgery, please pay attention to the Content-Type headers, etc, so that the message ends up cleanly formatted
- Avoid creating new lines that start with the word
From
(with any capitalization), since this is how mbox indicates the start of a new e-mail message.
Once this is done (still as list@leslie
) ask mailman to re-build all the archives for that list:
./bin/arch $listname
(anyone know of a way to do this in a more targeted fashion? for long lists or high-traffic lists, this step could take ages!)
You may also be interested in the upstream documentation about removing/redacting messages in mailman for more detail.