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All,
I'm on another list (who isn't...), where each message gets the
unsubscribe info appended at the bottom, much like each techwr-l message
gets the administrivia appended.
Except, it doesn't.
After yet another unwilling participant got cranky and frustrated about
being unable to unsubscribe, and several regulars berated them for not
following the simple instructions that appear at the bottom of EVERY
message that they receive from the list, it was revealed that not every
message gets those appendages. The frustrated, unwilling subscribers
might not have been so dumb after all.
So far, there's no sign of intervention or solution from the list
owner(s).
What we have discovered among ourselves is that people doing their mail
via Gmane often(?) don't receive the unsubscribe instructions at the
bottom of messages AND - and this is the interesting part - their
messages, as posted to the list, do not have the unsubscribe
instructions attached.
We reason that the list server is not treating everyone equally. If
somebody using Google mail was merely not getting a portion of each
message, that could be Google mail servers stripping out the offending
material before delivering to the user's inbox. However, if e-mail -
posted to the mailing list - gets to my inbox (I'm not on Google mail)
missing the administrivia that is supposed to be applied to every
message that the list-server forwards, then that's not Google. That's
the mailing list-server.
That further prompted me to wonder if the list server is also treating
those people differently by (perhaps) not sending them the unsubscribe
confirmation e-mail when they do finally discover the unsubscribe
address.
Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else had encountered this sort of
thing before, and what was the eventual outcome. Also, any guesses as
to the cause/mechanism of this differential e-mail handling might be
interesting. It's probably just a setting somewhere, but what? The
other list uses the ezmlm list-server program.
Somebody is going to have to fix the problem or... egad... document it!
:-)
- Kevin
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