Stephen Carter <carter@sncarter.com> wrote:

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I want to set my list so that no message is sent to new subscribers.

I've looked through the FAQ and the Manual, and read all the items in

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various rc files, and can't find where to set this--I know it's most

Thanks Werner, I'll see if I have access to that on my virtual server where this site is hosted. Here's the situation--perhaps others encounter similar needs. We put people on a list when they request certain information, so that we can send out follow ups easily. Also, we have several lists, and people may sign up for several at a time, and we want to return a single message, rather than a message from each list. Perhaps our approach is wrong. We are subscribing people by sending an email to the request-listname. Would it be more "normal" in these cases for us to have a script which would write directly to the accept file? Steve the likely

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right in front of me....

No. It's not implemeted, because it's rather strange to configure a list this way. New subscribers will get no notification, they will not know whether their subscribe request succeeded or how to use the list.

If you want to do this you need to modify the subscribe shell script in ~list/.bin.

Good luck,

Werner

Thanks, Charlie, for the additional commentary, and bringing up the question of spam. We're very anti spam, and would hate to be doing it ourselves! So let me clarify a bit: We have a number of needs to contact people on a regular or occasional basis through email. For instance, one of our clients might need to get information about a given product, a certain service, and get a lesson that they are paying for. They don't care just how we manage to send them the various pieces of info they have requested, or how we manage the regular sending them of specific information that they are paying us to deliver to them by email on a regular basis. We could, of course, use a data base, scripts, cron, etc. to send them mail with sendmail, but we really like SmartList (for all the obvious reasons)--there are more than one person subscribing to the same set of services, of course, so a mailing list manager seems to make sense. Out of a group of 500 clients, for example, maybe 50 have one service, 150 another service, etc. and of the first 50, 30 of those may be getting information on something that the other 20 are not. Anyway, you get the idea. We're setting up a personalization page for each person where they select their areas of interest, manage their information, etc. So we aren't putting people on Spam mailing lists--but using mailing list software as a tool to manage the email our clients get. For this kind of use, the "subscribe" message is inappropriate. Actually, depending on the service, or service set, we do send out a message, but the message will differ for each person depending on various factors, even though all the people are going on the same list. In addition, a person requesting a single service, may be going on several lists to manage the different kinds of information, depending on their requests. The people coming in from a particular university, for instance, don't want the information specific to another university, but everyone gets the same email for a certain lesson. So multiple lists. So this is why we want to be able to suppress the subscribe message from a particular list. We do appreciate your concern that SmartList not be made too easy for spammers to ply their distasteful trade, and have little inclination to assist them. SmartList is a great piece of software to manage email lists, and that's what we're using it for. I don't think what we are doing is in any way spam, but please give me your feed back, in case we are mistaken. Thanks, Steve Carter ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charlie Summers" <charlie@lofcom.com> To: "Stephen Carter" <carter@sncarter.com>; <Smartlist@Lists.RWTH-Aachen.DE> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 12:37 AM Subject: Re: Stoping the subscribe message

At 11:01 AM -0400 9/20/01, Stephen Carter is rumored to have typed:

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We put people on a list when they request certain information, so that we can send out follow ups easily.

Better idea; allow THEM to subscribe THEMSELVES to your list, which negates the need to remove the subscribe text; and I'd also suggest strongly you add the confirm routines to it to require subscribers to confirm their desire as well. I know if you stuck me on a mailing list without my explicit request, I'd immediately report you to your upstreams. (I have done _exactly_ that more times than I care to count when companies pulled that stunt on me.)

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Perhaps our approach is wrong. We are subscribing people by sending an email to the request-listname. Would it be more "normal" in these cases for us to have a script which would write directly to the accept file?

I think your approach is wrong, frankly, but not the way you expect. You should be allowing your customers to subscribe THEMSELVES...anything outside of that could rightly be considered UCE. (This explains why it took so long for anyone to respond to your initial question...many of us when reading your original request were uncomfortable giving you any information that would help you hide from your subscribers that you were adding their addresses to a mailing list without their express concent and confirmation. Unfortunately, your follow-up does little to ease that discomfort. Your subscribers should be in COMPLETE control to sub and unsub - otherwise it's just spam.)

Charlie