Re: Unsubscribe

This seems to be the nearly unanimous response to people posting an
unsubscribe request to the postgres mailing lists. I emphatically agree
with the argument - people should know better than that, and the
information included in the e-mail headers should be more than
sufficient. Every conceivable avenue of discovering how to unsubscribe,
other than the list software attaching a footer on each e-mail, is
available to pursue.

I also don't care about that argument in this situation. People
ignorantly posting an unsubscribe to the list get this kind of response
because it's an annoyance to the list users, not necessarily because we
care about educating that particular person. The posts obviously don't
help future unsubscribers who aren't willing to track the information
down anyway. We should be addressing this from the standpoint of what
benefits long-term list users the most. The real question is: which is
more annoying to list users, the occasional unsubscribe posted to the
list (with accompanying responses), or a one-line footer on each post
providing a link to unsubscribe instructions?

Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 10:03:00 +0200,
> Luc Delgado <luc(dot)delgado(at)aveyron(dot)chambagri(dot)fr> wrote:
>
>> Please unsubscribe me! Thank you!
>>
>
> If you really can't figure out how to unsubscribe from a list, you should
> contact the list owner, not the list. The list members can't unsubscribe you
> (and it isn't their job to) and the owner may not be subscribed to the
> list. The convention for lists is that adding '-owner' to the local part
> of the list email address will be an address for the owner.
> A good place to search to find out how to unsubscribe to a list is to search
> for the mailing lists using google. Usually the information on how to subscribe
> and unsubscribe are in the same place and you were able to find out how
> to subscribe in the first place, so you should be able to figure out how
> to unsubscribe by yourself as well.
>
>
>> Also, it would be better to have a message foot saying how to unsubscribe.
>>
>
> No, the standard is that the list information is kept in the headers so that
> it can be extracted by mail clients that care to. There is an RFC describing
> these headers. They are supplied by the mailing list software used for the
> Postgres mailing lists. Have your mail client display full headers for one
> of the list messages to get the instructions from there.
>

--
Nolan Cafferky
Software Developer
IT Department
RBS Interactive
nolan(dot)cafferky(at)rbsinteractive(dot)com