On 06/07/16 17:31 (GMT-0700) James D. Parra apparently typed:

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From: ERIC ALLAN [mailto:eallan4@verizon.net] Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2006 8:09 PM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: [SLE] SPAM: unsubscribe

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unsubscribe

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Unreal.

This has got to be a joke. Do these folks even read the mail on this list?

It's comical watching this stupid thread, as indirectly I'm the reason it happened in this particular case. Eric, my 20 year old nephew who lives more than an hour's drive away, brought his puter to me to install Linux on Wednesday, after repeated frustrations with windoze malware problems, and wanting to learn to do some sort of programming that requires gcc. He allocated what should have been plenty of time, about 20 hours including breaks for food and sleep, but it wasn't nearly so. I started by trying to put 10.1 on it. The installer locked up his puter on the first try during the normally interminable wait for package information to download, and again several times after having tried various kernel line options in an attmept to get around it locking up again, but all to no avail. This wasted quite a lot of the allocated time. I then tried memtest, Kubuntu 5.10 and 6.06, and Knoppix, and succeeded on all of them before getting mad at their differences from my familiarity with SuSE and trying the older 10.0, wasting a whole lot more time. That installer didn't hang his puter, but by the time that install was done and updated, there was very little time left for showing him around Linux. The very last thing we went through was how to find help (besides calling me on the phone), ending with (me, while he supposedly watched) attempting to subscribe to 3 SuSE mailing lists: suse-newbie and suselinuxusers on yahoogroups, and this. We only succeeded in getting confirmation from this before he had to leave. My intent was to show him how to unsubscribe from this after confirming the two yahoo groups, but those were apparently victims of the common yahoo groups lag bottleneck and didn't arrive before he had to leave. I talked to him on the phone after his first ill fated attempt to unsubscribe, and he claimed to have figured it out, so I didn't ask for details. I did remind him that the subscription requests were all sitting in his sent mail folder, and that they contained clues what to do, pointing out that doing the exact same thing except for including "un" in the appropriate place would get the job done. One of the reasons I find this thread comical is the frequency with which such threads occur. On most of the (very) many other mailing lists I subscribe to, besides defaulting replies back to the list they came from, getting on and off the list is much easier than here. I realize that the method used here is the traditional one, requiring email to get on, and email (to the proper address) to get off. However, most (unfortunately not all) other lists have made threads like this a lot less common, as they provide an easy to use web interface alternative for getting on and off, and all one need do to use it is click the link in any list email footer to open that web page. Then you check the box on that page that says unsubscribe to get a confirmation email sent to you. To that, you only need reply, and your subscription is history. It isn't necessary to know what a header is or where to find it, or start yet another useless (spam) thread about sending unsubscribe messages to the wrong place. Another reason for the laugh is the reason he wanted to unsubscribe in the first place. That's really a circular problem. He calls mail from this list spam, and it's partly because of threads like this he developed that opinion. When someone sends an unsubscribe message to the list, there's absolutely no good reason to send a reply to it back to all however many thousand subscribers there are on this list. All it does is create spam threads like this one, and keep the noise level up. Someone who considers mail from this list spam and reads none of it is not going to see any helpful message that the thread might possibly contain. If SuSE wasn't my favorite distro to use, I certainly wouldn't be recommending it to anyone likely to need help using it. Of the 40+ mailing lists I'm on, most of which being about help of one sort or another, this one has the most bothersome noise level and largest proportion of subscribers (and admins) with attitude problems of all of them. Add to that the fair share of top-postings and untrimmed replies, and I'd really rather not be here at all. This list should be reason enough to switch from SuSE to some other distro, but I'm resisting, which is far from easy. -- "If you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord', and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Romans 3:23 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/ -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com