[Mailman-Users] how to create an announce-only list / newsletter / admin-post only list

Nils Vogels nivo+mailman-users at yuckfou.org
Fri Jun 21 07:18:20 CEST 2002


On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 11:54:13AM -0400, Scott Courtney wrote:
> On Thursday 20 June 2002 11:17 am, Nils Vogels wrote:
> > Could you please explain me, why it is a good thing that people can not
> > unsubscribe from such a list ?
> >
> > I can imagine cases where the administrator of the list finds it important
> > that a message gets delivered to all the people /he/ wishes to explicitly
> > receive the message.
> >
> > While I agree this could easily be used for UCE, imagine a list of people
> > you want to send a christmas-postcard via email to. I'd really like the
> > good things from mailman, such as bounce detection, archiving etc, while I
> > also want to make sure that each of my online friends gets the digital
> > postcard.
> 
> Even in this case, though, I think it is bad form not to allow unsubscription.
> If you have a greeting card list, and someone takes the trouble to specifically
> follow a link or send a list command to unsubscribe, wouldn't that suggest that
> the greeting card is unwelcome? Unsubscriptions rarely happen by accident.

[ snip online friends ]

Somehow I recognise the situation .. :)

> I don't mean any disrespect to your views, but I'm still unable to come up with
> any non-spam reason for blocking unsubscriptions. If someone can think of one
> that I've overlooked, I'll gladly stand corrected. :-)

One other issue that I have, where the feature might come in handy is this:

Imagine this: I've got a nested mailinglist, like this:

mailinglist1
  - user1
  - user2
  - mailinglist2
    - user3
    - user4
  - mailinglist3
    - user5
    - user6
  - user7

Should anyone use the option 'lost password' option for maillinglist2, they would 
be able to get the password to control options such as unsubscribing, since
they know the address the posts go to. For obvious reasons, I /really/ do not 
want that ...

-- 
Nils Vogels		PGP:0xC26BD15F Available on keyservers.
S at H:4776WU/6.494yr	--> setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu. Will you find aliens?

My other computer is your windows box.





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