Oh god, I'm going to have to reply to this, aren't I, because it's tripped one of my bête noirs.
Where do people on the Too Online spectrum get these terrible, horrible, no-good wrong ideas?
(1) The idea that email are "private communications" and that the RECIPIENT of the email SHARING that email is somehow violating a sacred trust? YOU HAVE NO RIGHT OF PRIVACY IN AN EMAIL AS TO THE RECIPIENT. The natural end state of this argument is "I send you a bunch of spam, and then complain when you report it to my SMTP provider for VIOLATING my SACRED PRIVACY." It's an incoherent argument. It's wrong.
(2) Even worse, here, this silly person tries to upgrade a "private email list" into deserving the same sort of privacy protections deserved by email (WHICH, LET'S BE CLEAR, AS FAR AS THE RECIPIENT IS CONCERNED, IS: NONE AT ALL).
So the argument being made here is: RMS wrote something in a more-or-less public forum, but I'm going to complain that other people took it to a different forum.
That's a terrible argument and the fact that this is the one he OPENS with makes me want to stop reading immediately.