Even worse: A couple times I’ve seen people post a rant about how much they hate the listserve (it gets political and heated sometimes), then end the message with “take me off this listserve”. It sounds to me like they’re bluffing.
No, they won’t, because they are sending it to the LIST and not to the UNSUBSCRIBE ADDRESS. Invariably, they then start complaining after every single new message “I SAID TAKE ME OFF THIS LIST!!” etc.
joelavin.com discontinued his mailing list because a test message that he made accidentally got sent to the list, and between the 50 people who posted indignant “unsubscribe me!” messages to the list and the 200 people who posted (again, to the list) that they should follow the unsubscribe instructions… well it was just ugly. He ended up just shutting off the list
What’s worse is flaming rants from people saying they never wanted to be on the list, who are all these people, stop sending me messages, and so on-- when the list software makes it impossible for someone to be subscribed without his consent!
Attention idiots: If you’re getting messages, it’s only because you got a verification message from the list, clearly explaining that someone tried to subscribe your address (either you or someone else), and that you will be added to the list if you respond. Then you responded and were, of course, added to the list.
One of the mailing lists I was on recently had to change providers (Because Yahoo was screwing with the mailing lists constantly…). Well, this was planned and VERY thoroughly announced for a full month before hand, updates every few days, etc, enough that the people that read the mails regularly were just about tired of hearing about it. Sure enough, the list changes over, and in the first week, 30 or so members start bitching about why this new mailing list is filling their mailbox with “all this crap,” bunch of complaints about the admin adding them to this list without their permission, etc, etc.
That might be true in most cases, but on a couple of occasions I have received mail from lists I did not sign up for. Worse, those lists did not provide any unsubscribe information a a reply-to address.
ooh, one of my biggest peeves. I’m on quite a few mailing lists and this aggravates me to no end. The other annoying post is the “help, I forgot how to unsub” one when the subscription info is Right.There. Gahhhh…
Tangent rant: on one of my lists, someone went on vaction and her autoreply sent an email to the list every time she received one from the (rather high volume) list, triggering a spate of “what’s this auto-reply message mean” and then replies to THOSE. Admin finally unsubbed her, but it took a day or so and about 300 messages to do that.
They received a verification message, which clearly explains exactly what to do if they don’t want to be on the list. Then they replied, making sure to include the verification code, and received a welcome message with instructions on things like how to unsubscribe.
If after all that, they still don’t understand who these people on the list are, why they keep getting messages from the list, or how to unsubscribe from the list, they are fucking idiots and should be made into sausage.