[Mailman-Users] Unable to locate and email address in data base...

[Mark Sapiro]

<jean at dancecentral.com.au> wrote:
>
>I am using mailman version 2.1.5
>I am puzzled about something that has been happening several times.
>I have had members who asked me to be removed from my list. Most of the time there is no problem, I can locate the email address or the name and delete it.
>Once in a while I deal with people who had a forwarding to their email and the email address we have is not the same as the one they want removed, however it's not difficult and with a bit of investigating we can easily locate the email address to be removed and we just do that.
>lately I have had some people with hotmail.com addresses asking to be removed and no matter how hard I try or how wide I make my search (sometimes just a few letters of their email address), I can't come up with their name or address. They are sure they subscribed under the same name and address....
>Is there something I am missing ? Is this a common problem?

What membership list are you searching? Is it the output from

bin/list_members --fullnames

or something else like maybe the results from e-mail "who". If the
latter, this list doesn't show members who've chosen the "Conceal
yourself from subscriber list?" option.

In any case, since you appear to have the cooperation of the
subscriber, you could try mailing passwords with

cron/mailpasswds --listname=listname

(or you could just wait for monthly reminders to go out) and this will
either send them their password in a message that identifies them, or
you will have narrowed it down to those members who've turned off
their password reminders (you could find those with a withlist
script). One possible problem with this approach is Yahoo seems to
identify Mailman password reminders as spam. Hotmail may too.

Another thing you could try is if you can, enable full personalization
for the list for one post.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan