If there’s one thing I hate about the first of the month, it’s the flood of people on my mailing lists who get their monthly mailing list reminder, and rather than reading the damn thing and following the directions, send me email saying “please change my email address” or “please unsubscribe me”. 99% of the time, they don’t even tell me which mailing list, not that I care because I’m not going to do it manually. Today is running true to form – I’ve got 3 of these so far, and will probably get another 5 or so before the day is out, and a bunch more trickling in through the week.
Is it so god-damned hard to read and understand a few simple directions?
And of course, let’s never forget the people with those idiotic vacation messages. You know, back in 1987 I used “vacation” that came with BSD Unix, and *it* knew enough not to send vacation replies back to mailing lists. So why don’t the current crop of GUI-ridden crapware mail programs understand that simple concept?
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.
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.
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.
Whatever happened to the mailing list that aimed to teach users the fine art of unsubscribing?
Last I heard, the list was still going. It’s still a wretched hive of scum and villiany.
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.