** Sometime around 00:56 -0500 01/09/99, Chuq Von Rospach sent everyone:
>At 8:51 PM -0800 1/4/99, Nick Simicich wrote:
>
>> The clueless have figured out how to get on to a mailing list that takes a
>> two step process to get on.
>>
>> My general finding is that someone will tell me, "I've tried unsubscribing
>> five times, and it has never worked."
>
>This is why I ask for copies of the errors. It's a way of forcing
>them to actually DO it, without actually having to point out I keep
>logs (I'm even more anal about logging mail traffic than Nick is) and
>getting in their faces.
Yes, I have [long ago] found the same thing. I usually include something
to the effect that "if there is a problem, I really need to know about it
so I can fix it" (yeah, like Lyris suddenly stopped recognizing the word
"unsubscribe"). I usually receive one of two responses to that request:
1. "Hey, waddya know -- it worked this time!"
2. <dead air> (but with a successful unsubscribe)
It's much more effective (and productive) than telling the person that he
never submitted a request. Seems to work like a charm.
Another useful artifice is a filter that I have deployed across all of my
discussion lists, which looks for the usual variations of unsubscribe
requests in the subject line and in the body of the message (two separate
filters there, since the syntax is slightly different), and rejects such
posts with a message explaining how to properly unsubscribe. So far, it
has been 100% successful -- no misses to date, and no one has come back
to us saying that he can't figure out how to unsubscribe. (I have to thank
one of my co-listmoms for that -- he wrote the reply message that includes
the explanation.)
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