Confidential emails and the mailing list

Wed - 02/12/2014

Why can e-mails to the free mailing list be rejected when you're not subscribed?

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In one of our previous posts, we've already listed some of the reasons why an e-mail to the free mailing list can be rejected when you're not subscribed. One reason could be the fact that we thought it was SPAM, another could be that you were using the word urgent, but the following screen shot shows another reason:


When you post an e-mail to the mailing-list, it is automatically sent to more than 2500 subscribers and your mail is archived on different public archives. This may be your intention. If so, feel free to register on the mailing list and post your question to the public. In that case, it doesn't really make sense to add a confidentiality notice: your e-mail will be be visible to anyone with an internet connection.

There is no way we can know whether or not this is your intention, and we'd rather be safe than sorry. When in doubt, we reject the e-mail. In the past, we've received requests like this:

Could you please be so kind and remove from the mailing list archive the message with the subject "XYZ" posted by me (Anonymous), on Month day, year, from my email address. The attachments of this message represent highly confidential customer documents and were posted by error. We need to urgently remove them from the public internet.

Please understand that there is nothing we can do about this! We are not responsible for the problem you have caused yourself. You've sent your mail to about 2500 addresses. Most of these addresses belong to actual people, but some of them are used to populate third party mailing-list archives: Nabble, GMANE, mail-archive,... We don't have any control over these archives. You'll have to contact the admins of every archive separately, and hope they'll answer your question.

Note that the best way to get help is to buy a license with a support contract. If you don't have a license, then there's no business relationship between your company and the iText company. However, if you have a support contract, you'll get a special e-mail address you can use to contact us with PDFs containing confidential information. PDFs sent to this special address aren't made public.

We also get questions like this:

I will get in contact with each of the archive administrators but, as stated in their FAQ, you, as the itext mailing list administrator, must approve the deletion of this message. So I kindly ask you to reply me with a message like the one below, that I can then forward to the archive admins: I confirm that the message "XYZ" posted by Anonymous on Month Day, Year can be deleted from your archive.

If you have a similar problem, please refer the administrators of that archive to the following statement:

We, the administrators at iText Software, grant anyone who has posted anything to the iText mailing list, the right to ask the admin of any archiving sites, permission to ask the removal of his own posts for any reason he or she may have (privacy reasons, sent by mistake,...).

We hope this helps!



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