Expiry

Gmane respects the X-No-Archive, Archive and X-Archive headers. These headers allow users to say how long Gmane should store messages.

X-Archive

The Gmane X-Archive header controls whether email addresses should be encrypted, as well as the message expiry. The "expiry" token gives the length of the expiry period in days.

X-Archive: expiry=7

means that the message should be expired after seven days. Using a value of zero days means that Gmane won't store the message at all.

X-No-Archive

The obsolescent X-No-Archive header has only one useful value: "yes". Gmane interprets this to mean that the message should expire after 14 days.

X-No-Archive: yes

This feature can be disabled on a list-by-list basis. If the list admin requests it, the X-No-Archive, Archive and X-Archive headers will be ignored.

Implementation

Gmane implements expiry with cancel messages. Once a day, the expiry log is processed, and any articles that are found to have expired will be canceled. On the main Gmane site, cancel messages result in the messages disappearing from both the news and web interfaces, but the messages won't really be deleted. They will, however, be totally and utterly gone from public view.

Removing messages that you've already posted

If you wish to suppress messages that you've already posted, we need the following:

A list of article URLs that points specifically to the messages that you wish to have suppressed. You can use the search engine to find your messages.
An article URL looks like this:
```
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.discuss/14382
```
or like this
```
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.discuss/14382
```
If you say something like "remove my messages" or something equally vague, your message will probably be returned with a query for more specific information, which should be like one of the two URLs above.
Full name and contact information.
A statement clearly saying that you are the person who sent these messages, or are a person authorized to suppress these messages.

Send the list to the administrators, and they'll get back to you.