[Mailman-Users] Unsubscribe queue resend to patron after the email was subscribed

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mark Sapiro writes:

 > Your patron requested unsubscribe and answered the confirmation on Mar 1
 > and was then removed from the list. Subsequently on May 6 the patron
 > replied again to the original May 1 confirmation email which was still
 > in his/her mailbox. This time the confirmation token had expired and
 > that was reported back to the patron.

[Be careful, Mark.  It's true in my experience that in most cases like
this it's due to some action by the subscriber, but let's not start by
blaming the victim.]

As Mark explained, there is no need for administrative action, because
Mailman only sends these messages only in response to a mail being
received.  If the subscriber doesn't send another confirmation, there
shouldn't be any more responses.

While Mailman didn't queue or resend, there are several possibilities
for mail system failure outside of Mailman that could cause this.
It's not necessarily the case that the user sent more than one
response, and it's possible that the mail that triggered the response
was injected into the mail system months ago.  In that case, it could
recur, but it's a problem elsewhere in the mail system that you should
investigate; you may be losing mail.  You should be concerned, since
your post to mailman-users was also delayed unreasonably long.

In order to do more than speculate, we need to see the headers, not
the content, of the error mail received by the user.  Without looking
at those headers, the most we can say, as Mark said, is that
statistically the most likely explanation is that the user confirmed
twice.

Regards,