Timo Lynch wrote:
The process to subscribe must be different from the process to unsubscribe.
Nope, they're virtually identical -- send a message to the appropriate
address, receive a confirmation message that includes a link (set as the
Reply-To and contained within the body of the message) that contains a
"cookie" and the appropriate command, with an indirect form of the
user's account name. Responding to that gets a "Welcome" or "Goodbye"
message. All that really varies is the "users-subscribe" or
"users-unsubscribe" (or users-digest-subscribe,
users-digest-unsubscribe) part. But there must be a hole somewhere, and
you seem to have fallen into it. The confirmation and final messages all
come from [email protected], by the way, not from the list, so
the two message types could potentially follow different paths that
allow list posts to get through, but not the admin messages.
Thanks for responding, Timo, you were one of the ones I was going to try
to follow up with. And I want to express my appreciation for your
incredible patience and politeness in dealing with this issue -- it must
be enormously annoying to have this situation and be unable to get it
resolved for so long. I'd thought that you were probably OK now, since
we hadn't heard back about the difficulty in quite a long time.
Following the instructions, I have tried to unsubscribe several time without
success. I like the list but I have my emails forwarded to my blackberry
that I need to erase. I never have received the confirming unsubscribe
email that I need to acknowledge. This is the email that I subscribed with
and I have been told by the list that my ISP is probably blocking the
unsubscribe email. This may or may not be true as I have not pursued the
matter with them after their initial denial that they are indeed blocking.
Regardless, I was able to subscribe without any difficulty and without any
ISP interference.
The problem would appear to come about through the forwarding to the
Blackberry, since that's the most obvious difference between when you
subscribed and when you unsubscribed. How did you accomplish the
forwarding in the first place? You were already subscribed at that
point, right? Is the forwarding an "all or nothing" affair -- that is,
all the messages inbound to a particular account, or none of them? If
not, what kinds of filters can you (or the Blackberry admin process) set
up? One of the filter options for most mail programs is "delete from
server" -- if something like that is getting into the picture, there
wouldn't be much left in the way of tracks. Of course, if you can find a
way to establish such a filter, you can relieve the immediate problem by
not forwarding list traffic. We still need to figure out what causes the
unsubscribe process to fail, though.
Just for the record, here's my current collection of things that
interfere with unsubscribing -- I know you've already considered them,
but it's probably worth mentioning them anyway, since they might be of
interest to others, and somebody may have others to add.
* User doesn't know the address for unsubscribing
([email protected], or
[email protected]).
* User is trying to unsubscribe by sending the message from an
account that was not the one actually subscribed. This can be
done, but only by first finding out the name of the subscribed
account (it's available within the expanded header of any message
the user receives from the list, as part of the Return-Path), and
then using the indirect form of the unsubscribe: for example, if
the subscriber is [email protected], it would be
[email protected], or
[email protected].
* User is not receiving confirmation message because
o it is being trapped in a filter, either the user's or one
administered by the ISP, or
o the subscription was set up under the account of a malicious
third party who passes the list messages, but not the admin
messages, through to the user, and the user does not have
access to the subscribed account. (If all the messages are
being passed, the admin message can be responded to from any
account that receives it.)
* The normal Reply to the confirmation message is not accepted by
the user's mail program, because
o the Reply-To header is missing or damaged (in which case the
mailto: link internal to the message body can be used), or
o the mail client has a length restriction on the To: address
which is too short for the link, or a character restriction
that disallows the equals sign in the indirect address (in
which case the reply link can be copied into the "Subject:"
line, and the message then sent to
[email protected]).
* There is a third party involved who has subscribed the user
without their having any direct involvement in the process, so
that whatever is interfering with the unsubscribe was not in
effect at subscribe time. This should not be able to happen, but
situations like the above mail client address restriction problem
seem to indicate it is possible.
* The user subscribed under an account that has since been canceled
and is no longer passing messages through to the current account.
Specific administrator involvement is needed to resolve this,
because the effective confirmation message will only go to that
account and will therefore be rejected.
* ??
The advice given in various admin messages indicates that problems can
be addressed by sending a message to the list owner (in this case,
[email protected]), but I haven't seen any indication that this
actually works, or at least works reliably. It might also be worth a try
to send a message to the above users-request account, with the word
unsubscribe in its subject and/or body, there's been some anecdotal
evidence of that succeeding. I'm hoping that maybe the responsive
moderator for this list, Paul, will be able to supply us with a good
address to use for intractable problems such as what you're having.
Timo, let's continue this off-list; I'll report back to the list with
any resolution we can come up with.
Timo L.
Westchester, NY
PS Again I think this is a good forum and if anyone can suggest how to block
posting to it from being sent to my blackberry that would work for me as
well
-----Original Message-----
From: Barbara Duprey [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2009 8:26 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [users] Re: Fw: unsubscribe
<snip>
I'm going to try following up with some of those folks to see how and
when they subscribed, to see if there's a hole we can plug to keep this
from happening so much. We shall see!
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