Several things to follow up on.
* A day after I asked about Escribe.com taking visitors to the Naughton
Family Picnic, it was back to normal. Someone write me that Escribe had an
outage. How that takes you to the family picnic I don't know - could there
still be a rogue nameserver out there?
* I, too, get occasional messages (sent to the list address, natch) of the
form "HELP! I have been trying for MONTHS to leave this list" and I have
zero sympathy for them. How do you spend MONTHS trying to leave a list,
exactly. Send the same wrong-address unsub command every day, blink dumbly
at the "Not a member" response, and wait till the next morning to repeat the
whole exercise, in hopes that next time (unlike the previous 20 times) it
will suddenly work? Ignoring all the while a Digest footer that tells
exactly who to contact in case of trouble with the subscription? Ignoring
admin messages from the listmom that also give an address to write to? ...
Actually, in every case where I have been able to track down one of these
"trying for MONTHS" people, the pattern is more like
- August 13: join list
- August 15: send in a wrong-address unsub (along with who knows what
other random crap)
- Next three months: no activity
- November 11, 9:05am: send another wrong-address unsub
- November 11, 9:09am: post "HELP!!! I have been trying for MONTHS!" to
the list addy. :)
* On the "modem tax" and other hoax/legend/virus letters thing, will all
list managers reading this PLEASE bookmark the Internet Hoax resources:
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
http://kumite.com/myths/myths/
http://www.ih2000.net/ira/hoaxes.htm
and consult them whenever something vaguely similar comes around. Avoid the
"well, it can't hurt to pass it along" pitfall - it CAN hurt. And pass
these URLs on to your readers and/or hoax submitters, in hopes of doing your
bit to reduce the overally net.credulousness index.
