[Buddha-l] Make the subscription list visible to subscribers?

[Richard Hayes]

Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> What, aside from idle curiosity about who lurks on the list or some 
> malicious pfishing expedition, needs to have access to the member list with 
> email addresses? One can get the personal email address of anyone who posts 
> to the list just by looking at the "from:" item in their message.
> 
> Let lurkers lurk in the anonymity they crave.

The more I have thought about this over the past few days, the more I agree with Dan (and with several people who have written to me privately). I have not seen any compelling reasons to change the settings from what they now are, which is that only the administrators of buddha-l can see the membership list; moreover, I have been reminded of what the disadvantages might be for some. So I will leave this setting as it is. Some of you who wrote to me privately and asked to be hidden will remain hidden like everyone else, but you can, in addition, set your own personal "hide me" flag. Doing so will still not hide you from the list administrators, so it offers no practical advantage other than the possible assurance of a little more peace of mind.

As an aside (or perhaps even a digression), I have been receiving some very enticing offers all week from someone writing to me in ungrammatical French. All I need to do is send my social security number and the password to my on-line banking accounts, and they will deposit the entire reserves of five African countries into my account overnight. Pretty good deal, hein? Such shenanigans make me long for the days when only government employees and a few scatter-brained academics had e-mail accounts. When AOL came along, the neighbourhood starting going to hell, and there it has remained ever since. 

born yesterday,
Richard Hayes