At 9:46 AM -0500 1/4/99, murr rhame wrote:
> Even the
> clueless have a right not to get unsolicited junk in their mail box.
Of course, they signed up for the list. It's NOT unsolicited. They
may have decided they don't want it any more, but that's not
unsolicited.
> In my
> humble opinion, a list admin who doesn't un$ubscribe someone on
> request, is no better than a common spammer.
At some level, I actually agree with you. But half the trick is to
build systems easy enough to use so that these issues don't actually
come up very often. I've found that using a message footer, and a
digest unsubscribe block, as well as some of the other make-easy
tools I've added (like -unsubscribe addresses with mailto: links) has
pretty much removed this as an issue for me, even with the
exceptionally large numbers of very naive list users I deal with at
Apple. Now, I'm trying to work on making the subscription process
easier to drop that bar further, since we find the mailback
validation setup a necessary evil, but one which causes some
significant dropout during the subscription process (my numbers are
about 40% of the folks who send the subscribe drop out and never send
the auth -- but that once they get over THAT hump, only about 1%
actually have problems with the authorization process itself...)
And in practice, with very large lists like I run, you end up having
a couple of choices -- fixing the problems for people who CAN'T make
things work, or taking care of those who haven't bothered trying.
Guess which one gets my priority?
--
Chuq Von Rospach (Hockey fan? <http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/>)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
<http://www.plaidworks.com/> + <http://www.lists.apple.com/>
Featuring Winslow Leach at the Piano!
