[Mailman-Users] Subscribing from cell phones

[Scot Hacker]

Brad Knowles wrote:

>
>     If people are subscribing from their cell phones, then this means 
> they have a way to read and write e-mail messages.  That's all the 
> capability you need, in order to have a confirmation work.  They just 
> respond to the confirmation request by e-mail, and you're done.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? I can have  an email conversation all day 
long between my cell phone and my mail  client, but try to subscribe a 
cell phone to a mailing list and it's a different story. The 
confirmation message is received, you reply to it from the phone, and 
off it goes into  a black hole, the phone never actually subscribed. 
Eventually the list  admin gets the failure report I pasted into the 
original message of  this thread.

Some phones are able to subscribe to mailing lists, but most are not. I 
really have no idea  what mechanisms cause them to  fail. This is not 
specific to Mailman either - we  had  the same problem when we were 
running on CommuniGate Pro. I suspect that the problem could be at the 
service provider level. Most people get close to zero spam on our  
phones, and I think it's because cell providers do some extremely 
aggressive blocking. But once subscribed, the phones  can receive these  
daily haiku digests just fine (he currently has  about 3000 cell 
subscribers, but most of them had to be manually  added or  approved).

Scot