Re: Unsubscribe question

Hi David,

Thanks for writing. I'm posting this to the list too. As far as I'm 
concerned the issue with this fellow is resolved.
I did unsubscribe him. I'm not snotty just confused. ;-)

Yea I see you on the list often. I've been reading it for about 5 years 
now?? around that time.

I almost never post since during the course of writing a well defined  
question I often find the answer or
get so close I can let it float for a day and the answer pops up.

Anyway, there was really no talking to the guy to get any sort of 
diagnosis out of him. I can tell you that the list
was quiet (a one way announce list by the way) for some while and when 
it fired back up about 400 people unsubscribed
the first week. No hitches.

The funny, or strange part rather, not funny for someone to be so 
frustrated as David pointed out, is that not once in six
years have I had an issue with people dropping any of the lists.

This particular list is an art news thing so the users like HTML emails 
with pretty pictures. Subsequently I get to put a nice
big bold line "To unsubscribe from this list send an email to 
[email protected]" There is no confirm
on the unsubscribe. I know that opens things up to spoofing but these 
are art people, they don't get the reason for the unsub confirm
so I don't make them do it.

The three emails he sent, he sent to ME not the unsubscribe address. 
Then he claimed that he sent three there and three to me.
I get the feeling that I have an unreasonable end user.

Be that as it may, I am a little concerned about "what if the guy is 
telling the truth?" I don't want to jump to the ID-10-T fallback
answer if it really is some sort of corner case bug or the more likely 
thing that I have a misconfiguration issue. I doubt both of those
since things run so smoothly. But you never know. Just curious if anyone 
had a legitimate case of this happening.

On the other hand when you consider the probably billions of emails that 
have been sent out using qmail/ezmlm-idx around the world
over the years from all the qmail/ezmlm-idx servers it seems unlikely 
that a corner case such as this would go undiscovered.

So this brings my total to 7 possibly legitimate complaints in ten years 
of running list servs. So long as it is less than one a year on
average I be happy. ;-)

cheers

sparky

David Mussared wrote:
> G'day David & Sparky
>
> I just sent the following reply to [email protected] - and got a 
> strange interrogatory email from something called qsecretary, followed 
> by a whole lot of spam
>
> I dunno what I did wrong - I thought I was posting the ezmlm list for 
> discussing ezmlm issues. But I don't like what happened.
>
> Cheers
>
>
> David Mussared
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> G'day Sparky
>
> I think probably the person's spam filter blocked the 'confirmation' 
> email that he/she has to reply to in order to unsubscribe (the 
> confirmation email is a mess looking numerical thing which looks dodgy 
> to some spam filters, and is definitely not on their 'friends' list). 
> They may never have received the confirm-unsubscribe.
>
> It happens all the time.
>
> Just apologise, and unsubscribe them yourself as moderator. Also, 
> rewrite the 'unsub-confirm' text (the one they receive when they send 
> their unsubscribe request) so it warns people this might happen, and 
> that if they don't get a 'confirm unsubscribe' reply they will have to 
> ask the moderator to do it for them.
>
> I guess you could also uncheck the requirement for them to confirm 
> their unsubscription. Don't know what the protocol on that is - I tend 
> to leave it there.
>
> Cheers
>
>
> David Mussared
>
>
>
>
>> Sparky,
>>
>> > To day I got this ranting email, kind of funny actually,
>> > about this person's inability to unsubscribe from a list.
>>
>> That's kind of vague. What specific part of the process was your
>> user ranting about?
>>
>> > So I guess my question is, is there any issue with the
>> > unsubscribe process or is this guy lying to me to get
>> > some attention?
>>
>> I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that your user is
>> having trouble completing the conf step in the unsub process.  If
>> I'm right about that, then the issue could be that your user has
>> a lame MUA like Outlook Express or something.
>>
>> Fill us in with a few more details and we might be able to help you.
>>
>> 1) At what point in the process is your user failing?
>> 2) Which MUA (name and version) does your user have?
>> 3) What O/S (name and version) are they on?
>>
>> :: Stepping up on my soap box ::
>>
>> > kind of funny actually
>>
>> I tend to look at it a little differently.  If a user of mine is
>> flailing and frustrated, that becomes my problem even if the user
>> is "incompetent".  I am often struck by the relative lack of
>> computer/software sophistication in my user community.  I
>> consider it my job to make my system usable and understandable.
>> Each "failure" my users experience is an opportunity for me to
>> learn something and try to improve my system.
>>
>> :: Stepping down from my soap box" ::
>>
>> -- David I. Bell
>
>
> -- 
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