Re: Removal from list

[brian moore <bem@cmc.net>]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 10:53:45PM +0100, Marco Herrn wrote:
> Now I have the same problem. I tried it several times written the
> unsubscribe in the subject and in the body. But it doesn't work. Thats the
> answer I get:
> 
> You have not been removed, I couldn't find your name on the list.
> What I did find were the following approximate matches:
> 
> 1745 herrn@gmx.net                      32752 herrn@gmx.net
> 822 list.ebirn@gmx.net                 18529 herrn@gmx.net
> 432 c-3@gmx.net                        18227 herrn@gmx.net
> 741 sfr@gmx.net                        18227 herrn@gmx.net
> 623 gsmh@gmx.net                       17202 herrn@gmx.net
> 791 42ff@gmx.net                       17202 herrn@gmx.net
> 1197 m_g_m@gmx.net                      16631 herrn@gmx.net
> 704 molino@gmx.net                     15460 herrn@gmx.net
> 
> 
> What I find really interesting is that my e-mail adress is contained 9
> times!

Because it found 9 'similar' things and wasn't sure which you were
talking about.

The left hand side is 'addresses on the list', the right hand side is 'I
think it matches this address-like-thing I found in your mail'. 
Admittedly SmartList isn't exactly clear about the meanings there, but
I've played with SmartList for years and know it well.  :)

SmartList uses some weird logic to find address-like-things in mail
headers because, well, people suck and are subscribed based on all sorts
of things other than their 'From:' header (it could be their 'reply-to'
or their 'envelope-from' or 'sender:' and even then it may or may not
include a hostname like mail.example.com instead of just example.com....
handling mailing lists sucks when so many clients and users are broken).

> And this problem must be new. I have subscribed and unsubscribed several
> times already. And evertime it worked.

Someone changed the thresholds in SmartList (those funny numbers in the
3rd column).  The defaults (from ~list/.etc/rc.init on a Debian machine):

match_threshold =       30730           # for close matches to the list
medium_threshold=       28672           # for not so close matches to the list
loose_threshold =       24476           # for loosely finding your name

auto_off_threshold=   $medium_threshold # for auto-unsubscribing bouncers
off_threshold   =      $loose_threshold # for unsubscribing
reject_threshold=      $match_threshold # for rejecting subscriptions
submit_threshold=     $medium_threshold # for permitting submissions

Clearly the first line in your quote above is more close (32752 > 30730)
than is needed in a stock install of SmartList and is the -only- one that
is above the 'off_threshold', so it should remove you just fine.  It
should have matched your address, removed it and been done here:

 if $multigram -b1 -l$off_threshold -x$listreq -x$listaddr $remov $dist \
     2>/dev/null
 then
   $echo ""
   $echo "You have been removed from the list."

Instead it fell through to:
 else
   $echo "You have not been removed, I couldn't find your name on the list."
   if test ! -z "$unsub_assist" -a 0 != "$unsub_assist"
   then
      $echo "What I did find were the following approximate matches:"
      $echo ""
      $multigram -m -b$unsub_assist -l-32767 -x$listreq -x$listaddr $dist \
       <$tmprequest
   (etc)

Note that it opens the limit (-l) on the second part to show you
everything, even things far looser than what would normally match.

The numbers shouldn't be tweaked casually, but aparrently someone did
that.   They should undo that tweaking.

-- 
CueCat decoder .signature by Larry Wall:
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
printf "Serial: %s Type: %s Code: %s\n", map { tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/; $_ = unpack
'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_; s/\0+$//; $_ ^= "C" x length; } /\.([^.]+)/g;