On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Johnny L. Wales wrote: >Why doesn't the mailing list software catch that certain messages are just >the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject line and take appropriate >action? Perhaps not unsubscribing the person (You might send a message out >with that title about something else, I suppose...), but at least keep it >off the list and send them a message saying "You can't unsubscribe that >way. Instructions can be found here: [...]". It would keep the lazy people >who are unwilling to do things the right way from bothering the whole >stinkin list. ;)
How would that software handle a user who has problems with understanding unsubscribing in the IMAP protocol (the UNSUBSCRIBE command), whose subject may be: Subject: unsubscribe Subject: unsubscribe does not work Subject: please unsubscribe help This mailing list has unsubscribe instructions in _each and every email_. If people can't unsubscribe the way they are told to, then they are just as likely to solve the problem by pressing the reset button, formatting their hard drive and throwing their monitors out of the window - and still not be unsubscribed from the list. The worst thing with content analyzing tools is that there is too large a risk of false positives! People hate getting bounces for a completely legitimate email to a certain mailing list just because the word "subscribe" is used in the start of the body of the message. And that was again just to accomodate users who wouldn't get it right anyway. When all is said, if anything is to be done, if the mailing list was to add a footer with "to unsubscribe, please do this", and auto-email every user once in a while instructions on how to unsubscribe and so on and so forth, you would _still_ see those "I want to unsubscribe" messages. :P Andy -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: http://www.washington.edu/imap/imap-list.html -----------------------------------------------------------------
