On 11/6/07, Srini Ramakrishnan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Also, list unsubscription isn't hard; if you can follow instructions > that is. Users who are having trouble with lists are usually not > looking hard enough and give up fairly early, especially since asking > the list at large for help is easy enough.
OK, the empirical evidence is that a "number" of people have trouble doing just that. Further, I can state with confidence that keeping track of list subscriptions is a PITA. I cant even recall which mailing lists use passwords to unsubscribe, and which ones need a simple email and confirmation. These days what I do to unsubscribe from mailing lists is to set the 'send it to trash' option for the corresponding gmail label :-) In this day and age, anything more is too much work for the job. Seriously. Yes, perhaps I have to be a bit more organized, but hell technology is supposed to help me stay lazy. For many years now I have wanted a system, a mailing list subscription manager that would provide a single interface to view my currently active list subscriptions and modify subscription properties The 'interface' could/should be as simple a list of check boxes with mailing list names, and perhaps two buttons - Unsubscribe, Vacation. A mail system like gmail or yahoo mail already knows everything about our list subscriptions. It knows enough about the standard processes for the most important list managers (can open up an api to make support for other list managers avaialble from third parties). And it is fully capable of putting in hooks to capture confirmation mails from mailman and auto reply to complete the unsubscribe on the user's behalf. In short, with access to your inbox, implementing such a system should be fairly straightforward... right? I'd like to think so. [Maybe one of these days I'll overcome the inertia to complete the patchwork of procmail recipes and cgi scripts to have a working prototype] -Karra
