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 > >"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" 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 > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
