On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 03:08:15PM -0800, Erik Steffl wrote:
> brian moore wrote:
>
> well, the confusing thing is that the address that I tried to
> unsubscribe by explicitly listing it in the subject (I have the same
> problem) is exactly the same as the one listed as similar. And since I
> explicitly asked for specific address to be unsubscribed I see no reason
> for SmartList to try to figure out what the address is from headers.
Sure there is. For the simple reason that someone -changed- the defaults
so that your name would not match.
> one way or another, I cannot send email from subscribed address (so
> that all from/reply-to match) and I cannot unsubscribe (not sure if
> there is causal relationship between the two).
There is.
Again, this is how it works: SmartList sees a name to remove and looks it
up against the list. It -always- has a certain fuzziness it allows (to
allow for things like capitalization oddities: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and
[EMAIL PROTECTED] are almost certainly the same address and making people
play guessing games to get case right is stupid).
So it gets your request and goes through the subscriber list to find who
it could be. If there is one match with a value > the 'off_threshold',
which is, by default, 24476, then that address is assumed to be correctly
matched and it is removed. If there is more than one or none, there's a
problem: either the person simply isn't on the list with an address at
all like they're mailing from, or they may need to insert or remove a
hostname to make it closer.
In the post I responded to, there -was- one and precisely one address
with a 'closeness' of more than 24476. It should have removed that
person happily then.... but it didn't.
Now, add in a bit more info: it used to work for some people, and then
'something changed somewhere' and now they can't get off any of the lists
at debian. The only thing that matches that behavior is that someone has
either changed ~list/.bin/unsubscribe and broken it completely or they
have changed the 'match_threshold' values in a misguided effort to 'fix'
something. (The per-list settings are hardlinked to ~list/.etc/rc.init,
so changing the 'master' file will affect all the lists.)
SmartList is working fine.
It is doing -exactly- what it was supposed to. In this case, it's being
asked to either be so picky about 'exactness' of the match that it isn't
possible ("which is greater, 0.999999.. or 1?" -- ask a mathemetician
and ask a floating point chip.... heck, ask a fpu what '1/3 + 2/3' is,
and it won't be 1) or so loose that damned-near-anything matches, and it
doesn't know who to remove when it could be any of a thousand people.
(The 'do you mean..?' mail only lists the top contenders... it
deliberately does not list all potential matches.)
The problem is simply that someone has changed these settings and needs
to change them back.
--
CueCat decoder .signature by Larry Wall:
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
printf "Serial: %s Type: %s Code: %s\n", map { tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/; $_ = unpack
'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_; s/\0+$//; $_ ^= "C" x length; } /\.([^.]+)/g;
