Re: unsubscribe

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 11:51:31PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday 20 December 2005 15:42, Almut Behrens wrote:
> >Sometimes I'm wondering whether it's that very "REQUEST" being
> >capitalized that's confusing people -- and whether simply using
> >"debian-user-request@..." would make it appear more like a regular
> >email address after all.
> >
> >Of course, capitalization was meant to make it stand out clearly, so
> >it won't, under no circumstance, be overlooked. But does it really
> >achieve that?
> >
> >Due to its difference in perceptual quality, that "REQUEST" might
> > also be taken as some strange constituent that can't seriously be
> > part of an actual address they're supposed to use. Kind of like
> > some junk left over by mechanical processing, or some placeholder
> > <REQUEST>, $REQUEST they have no idea what to fill in for. Or I
> > dunno what... So, they figure to just strip it out and send to
> > debian-user@... instead, which they know does exist.
> >
> >But maybe I'm just thinking too complicated, and it's in fact nothing
> >more than people not reading (or actually not seeing) the appended
> >message at all. OTOH, I'm then wondering where they get the idea
> > from to use the subject "unsubscribe"...
>
>
> A lot of email agents do NOT show the line beginning with "-- " as the
> sig marker, or anything below it. Having that stuff appended to the
> end of a message does no good whatsoever for the folks using IE IIRC,
> so that they never see the unsub message (...)

That's one theory :) My personal hypothesis, OTOH, goes like this:
they actually do read, but have difficulties interpreting the message,
i.e. they get the part about using "unsubscribe" as the subject line,
but then somehow can't believe that debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
really is the address to use. The reason might be that weird "-REQUEST"
fragment in the address, as said above.

Well, we'll never know for sure, unless _they_ tell us what was going
on in their heads. That typically won't happen, though...

Almut


--
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