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Re: unsubscribe





David Kirchner wrote:
On 12/20/05, Almut Behrens <almut_behrens@gmx.net> wrote:

Sometimes I'm wondering whether it's that very "REQUEST" being
capitalized that's confusing people -- and whether simply using
"debian-user-request@..." would make it appear more like a regular
email address after all.


IMO, it would be a good demonstration of our problem solving skills if
we could manage to program the list processor to honor (or at least
not pass on to the general membership) messages with the subject
"unsubscribe". It's clear to us what this person wanted, and it ought
to be a simple matter for a perl script or whatever to handle it.

It seems to me that the only reasons this isn't done already are:

a) The list population enjoys reading and replying to frequent
messages from newbies who simply want to be done with the mailing
list.

b) The filter could catch something it shouldn't, such as someone
asking for aptitude help but using the subject "unsubscribe" to do it.

IIRC, the unsubscribe address autoresponds asking for confirmation, so
adding a note there instructing the user how to avoid getting caught
by the filter may be sufficient to handle the second case.



All my siblings here are based on the assumption that people actually read.... And that's clearly not a reasonable assumption. I mean, how many times do you just want to respond RTFM instead of actually helping?

Although, I have to say, it seems that a disproportionate amount of this unsubscribe's come from non-native-english speakers and so maybe its a sentence structure thing? Also, I use t-bird for email, and the "unsubscribe" footer is so faint as to be almost unreadable -- maybe a config item, but definitely, its tricky.



A



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