Earlier this morning, I wrote:

> Joe Rosenblatt asks:
>
>  > Pardon my ignorance but what does this mean?
>
>  It is the triumph of hope over reason or experience.

As no one else has answered with a more complete explanation, let me reply to
Joe's question with a more explanatory response.

The "X-no-Archive:yes" phrase is a string that has been agreed upon by the
archiving sites such as Dejanews to NOT archive those postings that contain
the phrase. Thus, if you put this phrase in your e-mail, Dejanews, being
honorable folk, will almost certainly not put your newsgroup posting into
their archiving database. The downside to doing this is that your words of
wisdom will never be seen by anyone else. Your postings -- in a thread of
postings on a particular topic -- will simply not be there.

The hoped-for upside of putting this phrase into your postings is the
expectation that spammers will not "harvest" your e-mail address from the
likes of Dejanews. However, that is almost certainly a forlorn hope. Probably
very few (or even more likely, no one) goes through the all of Dejanews web
pages and harvests addresses. That would be a computationally intensive
process -- and one that Dejanews could easily put a stop to if they found
someone doing it.

The far simpler (and far more reliable) thing for a spammer to do is to merely
subscribe to all of the newsgroups and search out e-mail addresses as they
come to him. In contrast to harvesting Dejanews addresses, this is
computationally light process that is completely anonymous. No one can tell
that you're doing it. And spammers, being who they are, are almost certainly
not going to pay any attention at all to the "X-no-Archive:yes" phrase.

The bottom line is: If you post to a newsgroup, or a mailing list that cross-
connects to a newsgroup, you're broadcasting your e-mail address to the world.
Because I post often here, I now get approximately a dozen get-rich-quick-
with-nude-Asian-girls-and-vitamin e-mail schemes a day. You just learn to live
with it. Putting "X-no-Archive:yes" in your e-mail is not likely to diminish
that number in any manner.

Wirt Atmar