[Imports] Decommission this mailing list

[Christoph Hormann]

> Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> hat am 13.06.2025 geschrieben:
> 
> [...] but I use Discourse's mailing list mode all the time, 
> and the idea that you get "a different reality" in emails to what is 
> visible in the forum is simply untrue.

That is exactly what having diverging perceptions of reality is about.  And the difficulty we have now is that we have no common immutable record of a single objective reality to verify our diverging perceptions against.

> By "the email version of reality" I presume you mean "what was in a post 
> originally, before any edits"?

Edits made to messages by their author after original posting are only a minor part in the differences between the email reality and the web interface reality.

I had been thinking about doing a thorough statistical analysis of the differences in content between the email reality and the web interface reality by scraping the discourse API and comparing the results with the email archive but i did not get around doing that so far.  I know from a few anecdotal observations though that the results might be interesting.

The most obvious difference is of course not in content but in the fact that the email reality systematically gets fake posting time stamps.

For example

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/pincode-fetching-wrong-data/131335/2

was made at 11:47 UTC and is indicated by the web interface that way.  The email version pretends to be written at 11:57 (though, as said, i have no way to objectively prove that to you).

> Also, the "list archive" isn't 
> always useful - see the last "announcement" here 
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/imports/2025-May/007294.html .

To me that archived version seems - letter-by-letter, both in content and in metadata - identical to the version i received.  And that is the whole point of an immutable archive.  I am not sure what other level of usefulness you are looking for in the archive of a communication channel.

In any case - this discussion is really, as indicated, kind of moot and evidently off-topic on this list.  

--
Christoph Hormann
https://www.imagico.de/