When I started my first mailing list, a condition of joining was that you were not allowed to unsubscribe. This made a few people angry when I stuck to it, but it sure did give them a good tutorial on how to unsubscribe… oh, they’d try all sorts of stuff. None of it worked, of course. But I’m sure it helped them later with lists where it was actually possible to unsubscribe.
-fh
Moral: never subscribe with your real email addy, use a throwaway. 
Other moral: always use an email client with good filtering options. My mailing lists all get sorted into folders, but they could just as easily filter into the trash 
Higher Moral : Kill yourself. That is the only way.
Opal I might just do that right now. Problem is I know I’ll forget someone.
Sometimes you can see a joke coming from the thread title alone.
It’s so obvious that I really expected this to be the second post in the thread.
And yet… I still thought it was funny!
Call me easily amused. 
Was this how the earlier mailing lists were? You mean that there was no automated way to remove yourself from a list, right? Sounds like of obnoxious to make people stick with a mailing list they don’t want - maybe they liked it at first and wanted out, but you won’t let them (sorry if I’m misunderstanding)?
go read the letters page at www.jokeaday.com - he gets loads of idiots writing to him asking to unsub every week, despite the brain-stunningly simple instructions on the site and on every mailing… he deals with them accordingly…
I was surprised it hadn’t been done yet. Someone had to (I guess that’s why Opal was right behind me.
I was once on a mailing list where the mod had wisely set up a filter so that any messages sent to the mailing list address were redirected to his address if the words “subscribe” or “unsubscribe” appeared in the subject heading or first line. That way he could take care of subscription/unsusbscription requests without cluttering up the list.
This worked very well until he happened to take a vacation for a few days, during which time a mod for a rival mailing list devoted to the same subject attempted to post instructions for subscribing to his list. Of course his posts on the subject never showed up on the list, since they were bounced to the mod’s mailbox and he wasn’t around to send them back to the list. The rival mod and his cronies began flaming the list, claiming that the first mod was censoring their messages to keep people from finding out about their great new mailing list! A long and annoying flame war ensued, and didn’t end until the poor mod got back from his holiday and sorted things out. And the two lists still aren’t exactly friendly.
One mailing list I used to follow had a member who was into sharing. Specifically, she forwarded most of the mail she received from the list to a friend of hers who was, apparently, not as interested in the subject as she was.
Said friend, having had enough, bombarded the list with unsubscribe demands, similar to those mentioned earlier in the thread. Of course, since he wasn’t getting the mail from the list itself, this turned into a comedy of errors for about three days, and ended up with the offending “sharer” getting the boot from the list.
A few members of the list took it upon themselves to email him directly, telling him to read the headers of the mail he was responding to, as they came not from the listserv but from his friend’s email address. He was, by this point, batshit crazy with all the email he was getting, and simply took every new piece of mail as an affront to his dignity, and, well, it got ugly before it ended.
[sub]It was pretty funny when observed from the outside, though.[/sub]
Slight hijack/nitpick:
“Listserv” is a registered trademark of L-Soft International, used to describe its electronic mailing list software. Using it as a generic term (lowercased) infringes on L-Soft’s trademark rights; thus, it cannot legally be used to refer to a mailing list. The similar term “listserve” is also a bit close for comfort. A better term would be “electronic mailing list” or simply “mailing list.” (I am forever correcting this and educating authors while copyediting mss.)
L-Soft’s Listserv page (scroll to the bottom to see the trademark statement)
International Trademark Association (scroll down to the Listserv entry; nonbold terms are the recommended generic terms)
Re the OP: Amen! Who are these idiots?!
When I was active on usenet, I used to see posts to the group asking to unsubscribe.
No, there was an automated way to unsubscribe from the mailing list, I just disabled it. Anyway, the page where you joined the list stated clearly that you would not be allowed to unsubscribe once you joined. It’s only obnoxious if you didn’t warn them.
-fh
Well… shame on them for not knowing that, but why would you not want people to unsubscribe?
I wonder what happened when people got new email addresses. Since they couldn’t unsub their old ones, I bet hazel-rah got some nice bounced messages there.