Christine Code <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, in an article with whose general tenor I
otherwise agree, says:
> Along comes a subscriber who uses a one-word alias instead of his
> name, confidentially mentioning that this is because he's so
> important in his extremely serious profession that his life would
> be at risk if he used his real name on the Net. (My "we have an
> idiot" bells start going off at this point.)
It may be a bit lame to insist on a CB-type "handle" as your alias, but I do
know people who don't want their real identities visible on the Net for
legitimate reasons. Let's put it this way, when you read in the paper how a
Tom Hanks or a Chelsea Clinton or [insert prominent person here] is either
"just discovering" email and the Net, or surfs and chats and sends all the
time, or whatever - of course they are using aliases. And there are people
who "borrow" their Net fix off their temp jobs, who need to do some whistle
blowing at their toxic waste plant, etc. Sometimes you have to use an
alias. Then you decide to join the Begonia Growers list so your wife can
download growing tips, and some little tinpot listserv autocrat tells you
"We insist on real names only here on Begonia Growers!" :) Right. Hand me
the obituary page hon...
> Mr Important has a hissy fit, demands he be unsubscribed. In
> response, he gets a polite letter which includes the "how to
> unsubscribe" directions. Ah, but he doesn't want to unsubscribe
> himself - he's far too important for that! So instead he he
> mail-bombs the list with about 100 massive messages (all forwards
> of previous digests with nasty notes attached) and gets quite
> pissed off when his ISP tells him he'd better stop violating
> their user services agreement. :-)
I get those too, and of course if someone listbombs for any reason it's the
instant death penalty - but after a lot of experience, I do tend to remove
people who ask for it, even if they should have remembered how. My lists
have a -leave alias, which isn't generally going to be transferrable to
other lists, so it's not like I'm doing them any big favor in life by
shipping them more instructions when they just want off. I do a nightly
roster on all my lists, and pass each one through a filter than makes a
little private web page listing all the addresses, with two buttons next to
each address: Mailto and Unsub. If someone wants off (or earns it), they're
gone in one click. There are Web based mailing list management interfaces
out there that give the same effect.
