I got an email to the mailman administrator account from somebody claiming that the previous owner of his email address must have been a pilot, and he wants to be unsubscribed from the mailing lists because “they clog up my mailbox”. I run a bunch of lists for pilots, but none of them average more than one message a month, so I wasn’t initially inclined to be kind to him.
I sent him a detailed message basically telling him where on the monthly message to find the url to click, and the password to enter. He wrote back saying that he gets “10-15 of these things a day”, which is baffling, and also said that he couldn’t get into the site I told him about because it says he isn’t a member, which is strange. So I decided that obviously he isn’t capable of learning, so I logged into the mailman server and did a “find_member”, which showed that the email address he’s using isn’t subscribed to any of my mailing lists. I informed him of that.
In return, he emailed me a copy of the latest message he got. Sure enough, it wasn’t from one of my lists, it was quite clearly marked where it *was* from, and there was a URL at the bottom for the site that was sending it. It wasn’t even a proper mailing list, in that all the recipient’s email addresses were in the From line. I went to that site, and there was definitely a “Contact Us” button on the front page.
Ok, lets assume that at one time his address *was* on one of my mailing lists, and he managed to follow the instructions to get off that mailing list. But I’m afraid I don’t understand how you go from “I’m on a mailing list [a], and I’m also getting email from [b]” to “it’s obviously [a]’s problem to get [b] to stop sending me mail”.
I used to get a fair number of messages like this. They were the result of someone on another list copying emails from my list to that list, including the .sig block with the “how to unsubscribe” information.
Since the other list didn’t put information on how to unsub on its emails, the poor schmuck thought he was following instructions.
So I’d guess someone’s aggregating your content without your knowledge.
He got unwanted messages from teh internets, so he contacted teh internets to make it stop. What do you mean, it’s not your problem? I want to speak to the person in charge.