Charlie Summers wrote:
And at the risk of alienating three quarters of the subscribers to this list, I have to say that if you can't figure out how to use an X-Command, given all the examples all over the place (see the Manual and the .examples directory), you shouldn't be running _any_ mailing list server. Use Topica or eGroups and save yourself a lot of grief. If you don't understand the simple concept of the X-Command, you shouldn't be adminning _anything._
Not everyone uses real operating systems. It is notoriously hard to get a high-end Windows mail client to send an X-Command. Then there is the fact that the SmartList documentation doesn't mention the fact that you can send multiple X-Commands in one email. Sending email after email when you have lots of maintenance to do gets quite tedious. For this reason, I wrote a CGI script to do multi-subcribe-unsubscribe-checkdist-etc. from a web form.
And if your potential subscriber is too stupid to subscribe without you needing a Web-based X-Command system to send a subscribe X-Command, do you really need _that_ subscriber? (My tolerance for people who can't follow the simple confirm instructions is long past exausted.) That sounds to me like the blind leading the blind...
The level of competence in the average Internet user has gone down. I had to put in a pre-screening before accepting a subscribe/unsubscribe because users didn't understand the failure messages that Smartlist puts out. I check only for exact matches (case ignored), so it's possible that multigram will catch some duplicates I didn't on a subscribe, but my users are certain of whether they have succeeded in unsubscribing, which is, by the way, imperative in today's Internet, where everybody has tried out several mail services. That is, Johnny gets onto yahoo.com and subscribes john4832@yahoo.com to your list. Then he switches to hotmail and sets yahoo to forward there. Then he gets a corporate account ( john@dunkindonuts.com ) and sets hotmail to forward there. When the boss complains about him getting personal mail at work (your mailing list), he's probably too clueless to realize that the list doesn't have john@dunkindonuts.com . As a result, he sends in an email, thinking its been laid to rest, eventually gets a failure notice, tries a few more times, gets really angry, and starts sending you threatening emails. If he already knew, instantaneously, that he is not subscribed with that address, the problem is reduced, at least to a certain extent. So, essentially, I think the reasons for web interfaces to SmartList are (1) ease of executing X-Commands (2) possibility for instantaneous feedback for users (3) ease for users too stupid to type "unsubscribe", since anti-spam activists tell them to send "remove" instead. Mark Polo