[Mailman-Users] This is unixstuff warning

[JC Dill]

On 04:38 AM 6/13/01, Ed Wilts wrote:
 >On Wednesday 13 June 2001 02:25 am, Enriko Groen wrote:
 >
 >> And frustrated too because they get 70 emails or so a day and don't know
 >> how to leave the list.
 >
 >All they have to do is to display the headers of one of the mail messages.
 >The unsubscribe information is in there.

There are too many people on the Internet these days who CAN NOT view all 
the message headers.  AOL hides many headers.  Hotmail hides many 
headers.  Yahoo hides many headers.  Even if there is some process the user 
can go through to eventually view all the headers, someone who wants to 
just stop receiving 70 mails a day is just going to start whining (to the 
list!) "how do I get off this list, I can't handle all this email!"  They 
are NOT motivated to figure out how to "view all the headers" to get that 
information.

IMHO, unsubscription information needs to be in the *body* of the email (in 
a footer), for two reasons:  1) so people see it when they are actively 
reading the list and thus will hopefully remember it's there later, when 
they want to unsub, and 2) so people can readily find it when they do want 
to unsub.

I subscribe to the "teach them to fish" method, and if someone emails me 
(as the list admin) or to a list that has the footer, I point them to the 
footer and say "follow those instructions, if you have problems email back 
and say *exactly* what problems you have".  This works about 90% of the 
time.  The biggest case where it doesn't work is where the subscriber has 
(or had) more than one email address and can't remember what address they 
used to subscribe, and they are trying to unsub the wrong address.  Or 
trying to unsub from a list when they are subscribed to the digest (a 
problem with the one list I manage that's still on majordomo).

jc