Comments on: You got on, you can damn well get off

By: Phil Gustafson

Phil Gustafson — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

I subscribe to a few lists whose members are, in general, less computer-savvy than those on yours.

At least once a week, someone posts a HOW DO I UNSUBCRIBE FROM THIS DAMN LIST message, not noticing that the instructions for unsubscription are appended to each and every message.

I suppose you can’t expect banjo players to read.

By: Paul Tomblin

Paul Tomblin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

The sad thing is that I have the worst trouble from the people on the mailing lists for pilots and Linux users. I always thought reading instructions and following them was sort of an important skill for pilots and Linux users, but I guess not.

By: Alice

Alice — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

I’m on a set of lists for the Yale Psychology Department. On those, the only way to modify subscription options is by emailing the list manager; I had to phone the Psych Department office to discover this. The department arbitrarily subscribed some, but not all of us to the lists; some of my colleagues don’t want the mail, and others would really like to get notices of talks.

They’ve just migrated the lists to Mailman, for spam management, but they aren’t publicizing the web interface, for reasons that don’t make sense to me. Go figure.

By: J.

J. — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Whatever happened to the mailing list that aimed to teach users the fine art of unsubscribing?

By: Paul Tomblin

Paul Tomblin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

Last I heard, the list was still going. It’s still a wretched hive of scum and villiany.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000

I am the admin for a mailing list for a bunch of non-techies at a university. The list software has a non-negotiable limit of 40,000 bytes per message. I have no control over that, it was set up by the guy who configured Mailman. If you go over that, it bounces the message with a clear explanation of what you did wrong and who to email if you have a problem with that (me).

The most frequently asked question on that list is the one about how to exceed the limit. When I look in the logs I find they’ve just tried to post in HTML with image background with a pointless 3Meg Word file attached.