开云体育

Hello everyone

I would like to create a couple of mailing lists (5 or so) to replace some dead Yahoogroups groups that were all related to user support for particular versions of a software product.? Most of those groups still have many users, but there is almost no activity anymore.? The owners of the groups are surprised at the fact that their groups' archives have been deleted (they did not know!), and is now encouraging users to join the product's universal Facebook group.? The owners believe that mailing lists are outdated and that most people want to use Facebook these days, but there has been some negative response to these announcements.

I'm not sure if these groups will become "alive" again when they become Groups.io groups and many of their members join the groups here, but I would like to give people this opportunity, and I would like to make the archives available on Groups.io (in the database section).? It may be that even if many people join these groups, they will become no more than accessible places to search the archives, with little or no actual conversations taking place -- although there are ways to artificially generate interesting, relevant traffic on a list (e.g. news about new releases, etc.) and encourage people to start replying.

I don't have permission from the group owners for any of this, although they know that I'm going to try.? The groups' archives on Yahoogroups were public.

So my question relates to two issues: whether it is okay to invite people who are not expecting to be invited, and whether it is okay to make message archives available without every individual person's permission.

I suppose it could be said that the group owners "own" the archives and that only the group owners can give permission for uploading the archives.? On the other hand, I could take the approach that I simply inform everyone whose e-mail addresses are in the archives about the fact that their e-mails are now hosted here, and give them the opportunity to "opt out" of having their old mails hosted here.? I could further ensure privacy by replacing all e-mail addresses in the archive with special numbered addresses so that the real addresses don't show up in searches but so that I can search for such people's e-mails (for easy deletion of messages)... however, that approach won't remove other identifying information from the archives.

As for inviting members, what do you think?? If I can get a list of all recent and previous members of the old groups, do you think it's acceptable/ethical to send them a once-off invitation via Groups.io, explaining the reason for the group, etc.?? What is Groups.io's attitude to that?? Is it assumed that a person who gets an "invite" will already be expecting the invite?

Thanks
Samuel