There are good reasons why that is not a feature found in many popular
email clients. The biggest of which is that if it was people would use
it all the time and spammers would abuse it as a way to cull current
email addresses. As a matter of fact, most large esp's encourage their
clients to not use any unsubscribe links in unsolicited email (spam) due
the this type of practice. Microsoft's moving towards a system using it
(it's currently in their Hotmail Live Beta) that only gives the
unsubscribe option if the sender is in the recipient's address book or
the recipient has previously ok'd the sender as being legit.
Joshua D. Drake wrote:
Tom Lane wrote:
"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Bill Moran wrote:
Instructions are in the mail headers of each message:
Actually it is quite ridiculous that we expect someone to read the
mail headers.
Those headers are really there for mail programs to read. On my MUA
(a several-years-old version of exmh), messages containing these headers
causes an additional menu entry to appear, with List/Unsubscribe and
some other options. I suppose there are still people using mailers that
don't know about RFC2369, but considering that that standard was
published in 1998, there's not a whole lot of excuse for that.
Thunderbird, which I expect MANY of our community users are using does
nothing with those headers (as far as I can tell).
Outlook and Outlook express, which many of our community users will be
using in the future (by nature of our win32 port) to my knowledge does
nothing with those headers.
I know that Evolution has some functionality based on those headers,
but no one in their right might would use it (yes that it a blatant
smack).
I also seriously doubt that Apple Mail or Mac Mail (whatever it is
called) does anything with the headers either.
In any case, we also expend bandwidth on a couple of footer TIPs that
remind people how to unsubscribe. Maybe one of them should explicitly
say that mailing to the list is not the way.
Our lists (the @postgresql.org ones) are the only lists to which I
subscribe that do not put the unsubscribe info at the bottom of every
email sent to the list.
Sincerely,
Joshua D. Drake
regards, tom lane
--
erik jones <erik@xxxxxxxxxx>
software development
emma(r)
