Re: plz unsubscribe me

In response to "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com>:

> Tom Lane wrote:
> > "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> >> Bill Moran wrote:
> >>> Instructions are in the mail headers of each message:
> >
> >> Actually it is quite ridiculous that we expect someone to read the mail
> >> headers.

I don't find it so. That's like saying it's ridiculous to expect the
average auto owner to change the oil every 3000 miles. Reading headers
isn't a terribly esoteric thing to do. I taught an "intro to email" class
back in 2000 and spent about 5 minutes explaining headers and what they
meant. The students didn't have any difficulty grasping the concept, and
I got the impression that they found the information enlightening.

> > Those headers are really there for mail programs to read. On my MUA
> > (a several-years-old version of exmh), messages containing these headers
> > causes an additional menu entry to appear, with List/Unsubscribe and
> > some other options. I suppose there are still people using mailers that
> > don't know about RFC2369, but considering that that standard was
> > published in 1998, there's not a whole lot of excuse for that.
>
> Thunderbird, which I expect MANY of our community users are using does
> nothing with those headers (as far as I can tell).

I've never been a big fan of Thunderbird.

> Outlook and Outlook express, which many of our community users will be
> using in the future (by nature of our win32 port) to my knowledge does
> nothing with those headers.

It's a shame that nobody at Microsoft is smart enough to figure it out.

The thing that really gets me is that Sylpheed doesn't use them ...

> Our lists (the @postgresql.org ones) are the only lists to which I
> subscribe that do not put the unsubscribe info at the bottom of every
> email sent to the list.

I guess that makes RFC2369 another great idea that nobody's paying attention
to ...

shame ...

--
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.