Talk:List of email archive software

Contradiction

This article starts with "This article does not list email archive software products.".

This is meta information. Does it belong there? And doesn't it contradict with the title, "List of email archive software"? Shouldn't it at least say what it 'does' contain? --Mortense (talk) 12:47, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

This article used to start, appropriately, with the sentence “this article lists email archive software products”. And it used to include a section named “Product and Service listings”. That section was wholly deleted on 2016-02-27 with the comment “mostly non-notable, spam magnet”. Two months later, another editor saw this and modified the introduction, with the comment “this article claims to be a list of email archive software, but does not actually list any. so.”. Presumably, bafflement ensued across the readership, including you and me.

My perspective is that:

• Removing the list wholesale is not terribly helpful. In fact, it eliminates the raison d’être of this article, so it effectively defaces it. If one objects to the existence of the list, it would be more appropriate to request the article’s deletion.
• Reviewing the list, I didn’t find that it was, in fact, a spam magnet for non-notable products. Most products listed are offered by providers of some weight, and are used by a substantial number of notable customers. But I can understand that different readers may have a different perspective on this. In any case, most entries (by far) were on topic.
• I think that such a list can be reasonably useful, as long as it is curated, organised and maintained. More on this below.

For those reasons, I have restored the list. Again, if you disagree, please consider requesting the deletion of the article rather than simply wiping out its content.

Before copying back the list, I have tried to do a first pass of scrubbing, with the aim of removing the following:

• Defunct products.
• FOSS products that do not seem actively maintained.
• Proprietary products from anonymous developers (i.e., without any real contact information).
• Proprietary products that seem really insignificant (only present on shareware sites, etc.).
• Pure hardware products (but I left products also available as virtual machines, or as a cloud-based service).
• Multi-purpose products (office suites, content management, etc.) that include e-mail messaging and whose built-in e-mail system includes mail archiving (either built-in or through an extension). In other words, I tried to only keep products or services dedicated to archiving data from third-party mail systems.

I also eliminated the red links and replaced them with external links where no articles are available.

There are still plenty of work to do; for example:

• This really needs to be organised to increase usability; for example:
  • Free and open-source vs. proprietary and paid (I only found one example of proprietary with a free option for personal use).
  • User-installable software vs. cloud-based service.
  • Supported systems and file formats (for example, several products are dedicated to Microsoft Exchange, GMail, etc.).
• This could be expanded to include solutions capable of archiving other messaging methods (posts on social networks, etc.). Users of email archival systems often have regulatory compliance in mind, and email is only one of several computer-based messaging techniques that they use.

I am hoping that someone else will kindly go on and improve this…

— Wlgrin 06:07, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Bot appears to have inserted irrelevant link

Not sure how to properly fix this: Problem: Under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_email_archive_software#Products_and_services, the second bullet point, CGS Unlimited Mailbox, contains an irrelevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centimetre%E2%80%93gram%E2%80%93second_system_of_units

Questions: Was this link created by a bot? What is the best way to remove this link?

 * Can the link be removed in a way that leaves "breadcrumbs" so that bots don't make the same mistake again?  Is there a best practice or Lessons Learned way of doing this to minimize confusion for other human editors?  I.e. can we straighten out the bots without messing up the humans?
 * Are there methods or tools to link the entire company and/or product names for future auto-linking without having to unnecessarily create an article stud?

Thanks for your time and consideration. Tree4rest (talk) 17:52, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

It appears we don't have an article on CGS Unlimited Mailbox. On the other hand "CGS" is a common abbreviation for the centimetre–gram–second system of units. Thus readers searching for "CGS" are pointed to that article via a redirect. Links to CGS similarly are redirected to the centimetre–gram–second article. That wasn't added by a bot.

Since lists such as this one generally should not list every piece of email archive software ever written but only notable ones, I have removed various entries for which we don't have articles, including CGS Unlimited Mailbox. That also takes care of the link, of course. Huon (talk) 18:17, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I accidentally hit [Save] instead of [Preview] and then received a response before I had even finished (what a mess). I should mention, I'm good with technology, but new to editing Wikipedia.

First here is the rest of what I was trying to say:

Problems:

 * 9th bullet point, Piler (GPLv3), has what appears to be a valid link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piler but when followed is redirected to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pileru

 * All of the other links go to company pages, when the section header specifies product names.

Questions:

 * What happened in Pileru?  Obviously, something on the wikipedia servers (perhaps a link resolver or automatic error correction) or just maybe Google Chrome, (but I've never seen anything like that before. I'm just clicking on a link, not doing or typing anything in the address/awsome bar.)
 * How are "Red Text Links" created?  I've seen them in several articles, but instead of going to either another article or stud, they show failed search results and suggest creating a page or stud.  Is this behavior that we can direct Wikipedia to do on purpose, rather than redirection to an ambiguous link (or even a entirely different work that just happens to have a similar spelling)?

Second, my reply to the first response:

Huon thank you for helping me with this article. I have some follow-up questions that I think are still relevant to this article, so I'll try adding them here.

I don't completely understand your first explanation. I get the nature of the original "CGS" link and perhaps redirect explains what's happening with the "Piler/u" link as well. If these links weren't created by bot, then are we left to presume that the original author or another editor created these links, perhaps in error or haste?

If so, is there any guidance or policy criteria regarding when bad links should just be removed, rather than presumed to need correction, expansion, or new-stubs? If not, do you have best practices have you could pass along, such as rules-of-thumb, etc.

Then, I don't mean to quip, and normally wouldn't give a second thought to such house cleaning. Nevertheless, in this case, I'm observing what appears to be a glaring hole in topic coverage and possibly overall subject linkage and organization.

As someone that spends a lot of time trying to find useful alternatives to not only current software, but software development strategies as well, your second action baffles me a bit. I agree that this article may be very rough in its current form. However, after researching related technology and solutions for the past two weeks and coming across this page today, I could not fail to notice that most of what is listed here seems like relevant, but unique technologies that have opened up new avenues for further inquiry at a categorical level.

Specifically, as I can best recall, none of the following (small sample) of articles that I've been researching seemed to not only list any of the products mentioned in this article, but don't even hint at the existence of another line of related technology and products:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_email_archive_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_retrieval_agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_delivery_agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document-oriented_database

I get that we need everything in its place, but if others have gone to the trouble of putting forth new avenues of exploration, I wonder if there isn't some better place to at least park this information. I mean, given the size of the other lists and long history of the underlying base technology, this may easily just be scratching the surface. There is certainly a need for more and better organized information for these topics.

While the current requirements of my work don't allow me to travel down this particular fork in the road, I imagine that several other students and professionals who come across it may hopefully find that investing their time and effort into further full expansion of this material, equivalent to the above examples (including historical sections), would be a useful endeavor.

That being the case, and given that I'm new to editing, I'm struggling to understand where to bring this up in the larger scheme of things. For further discussion on that, please see my talk page.

(PS: It may be a few days before I can check back on this.)

Tree4rest (talk) 20:01, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

I have cleaned up the list a little more. We never had an article on a software or a company named Piler; as you suggest, likely someone just added a link without checking what that link pointed to, and Piler redirects (since 2007) to the article on the Indian town - a "redirect" is Wikipedia's electronic version of what a paper encyclopedia would label as "See XYZ". If we have an article on the topic, maybe under a different name, the link should of course be fixed. If it seems unlikely that we'll ever have an article, the link should be removed entirely. For lists such as this one that would likely accumulate cruft if we didn't have some inclusion criteria beyond "it exists", it's generally held that only items with articles should be listed, so when removing the link I removed the entry, too.

Red links are created when the code for a link is added, but the target page does not exist. For example, we do not have an article on useless stuff - but that does not prevent me from adding a link to that nonexistent article. The idea is that if there's a worthy topic on which we currently do not have an article, a redlink can tell people that expansion might be helpful.

You may want to take a look at Help:Links, particularly the part on "piped" links which explains how displayed text and title of the linked article can be made to differ.

I have referred you to WT:WikiProject Computing on your talk page. Huon (talk) 00:38, 5 October 2017 (UTC)