At 5/18/2000 09:47 PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote or quoted:
>It breaks MIME structured bodies, which are often useful for particular
>purposes. It breaks some signed posts. It's useless information for 99%
>of the recipients. And I'm really sick of seeing mailing list posts
>accumulate more and more worthless junk to the point that it's practically
>more unwanted bytes in my mailbox than spam is. It's rather simple to
>skip over the messages from the completely lost people; footers that any
>intelligent person doesn't need are both intrusive and ugly.
Say, here's an idea, which I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement:
What if, when you first subscribe, it automatically sends you messages with
a footer, and the footer says something like:
----------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, [do some stuff]
To remove this footer, [do this other stuff].
Then people can self-select whether they're intelligent or not. Anyone that
can remove the footer *must* have seen and noticed the
unsubscription-instruction footer, and they can obviously read and follow
directions (or they wouldn't have been able to ditch the footer in the
first place).
Since I use Majordomo, I know nothing of ezmlm internals, so I'm not sure
how hard this would be to set up. But it's a thought for how to deal with
the situation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
finger trouble /n./
Mistyping, typos, or generalized keyboard incompetence (this is
surprisingly common among hackers, given the amount of time they
spend at keyboards). "I keep putting colons at the end of statements
instead of semicolons", "Finger trouble again, eh?".
