FYI, here is a bit more detail regarding the issues we encountered: The main issue: > What we discovered is that it's not possible, in Mailman, to turn this off for everyone whilst still allowing individuals to selectively turn it back on. We had thought that was the case initially, but it turned out Mailman doesn't behave that way. This is why we're back in this position now. History of events: > 1. There was a discussion and decision to move the default to “do not send” > > 2. The change was implemented, and we assumed that people can edit their settings > > We turned the "send reminders" but to "off" for every individual subscriber. They were able to turn them on again through the Mailman admin interface. We also changed a Mailman setting that was supposed to make this the default for new subscriptions to new or existing lists. > > We found out that the default setting did not work, which is to say that new subscriptions to lists were enabled for password reminders by default. > > 3. Some months later, in 2014, another setting was changed but accidentally caused the reminders to not be sent despite settings otherwise > > The setting was supposed to turn the password reminder default to off by list. This was thought to turn off the default option, but still allow users to turn them on. What actually happened is that this turned the password reminders for every member of that list, regardless of their individual option. > > 4. The setting was reverted > > We turned that bit back off on the lists, so that individuals who had opted for automatic reminders would get them again. > > 5. Subscriber growth > > In the meantime, while all of the above was transpiring, we were gathering new subscriptions to various lists. When the reminders processed after the configuration change, tens of thousands of reminders were sent. > > What we have discovered through this process is that there is a key element missing in Mailman, and that is the ability to make the "send password reminders" bit default to off for new subscriptions. The result of this is that if we go through and do a mass reset of those settings, we will still over time build up a very large group of automatic reminders, with all the concomitant issues that come from bulk mailing tens of thousands of reminders. ISOC encountered the same issues and ended up turning off the automatic reminders.
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