At 3/29/2000 07:38 AM -0600, David Dyer-Bennet wrote or quoted:
>As to "almost all other mailing lists" doing it -- not one of the
>mailing lists I'm on, over a dozen, puts unsubscribe instructions in a
>trailer. Some put it in a header, some nowhere in the message.
I used to think this would be a good idea. But I recently got onto a
mailing list that puts the unsubscribe information as a trailer on every
message. This mailing list is also moderated (in the sense that submissions
go to moderators who then decide whether or not to let them through to the
list-at-large), so everything seemed fine...
Until two weeks ago, when they decided people had been good, and they'd try
un-moderating it. From my perspective as a random listie, a huge flood of
messages suddenly hit the list, saying everything from "How do I
unsubscribe" to "Get me off this list, now!" to "I DONT WANT ANY MORE OF
YOURS STUPID EMAILS. STOP SENDING ME OR I WILL SUE."
There were at least five of these per day, often more. Even pointing out to
these morons "The unsubscription instructions are at the bottom of every
email", roughly two or three times a day, didn't clue them in. (It seems
logical that people who are too illiterate to read unsubscription
instructions are too illiterate to read directions on where to find those
instructions.)
>And I think that people who use software that hides headers from them
>should simply learn to force it to show those headers, and should look
>in those headers when they're puzzled about something relating to a
>message.
While I'd like to see this become a standard behavior, I don't think it is
one now, and expecting people to follow it is a little unreasonable.
Encouraging them to is another story entirely.
But I certainly don't think that including unsubscription instructions at
the bottom of each post will have any effect on the density of unsubscribe
requests.
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Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
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From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
finger trouble /n./
Mistyping, typos, or generalized keyboard incompetence (this is
surprisingly common among hackers, given the amount of time they
spend at keyboards). "I keep putting colons at the end of statements
instead of semicolons", "Finger trouble again, eh?".
