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.delgado@aveyron.chambagri.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.cafferky@rbsinteractive.com