On Wed, 4 May 1994 07:42:41 -0500 Bob Parks said:
>I am wondering *flame on* just whose 'bright' idea it was to have
>confirmation of subscriptions? *flame off*
Guess any  listowner's who has set  the Confirm on the  Subscribe= keyword.
Either they did it because it was new or they had a good reason for it. I'd
suggest you contact the owner of the particular list(s).
>
>                                        (at least for those who want digest
>which is what I recommend to all  neophytes).
You  are  free to  do  so.  But DIGESTS  are  as  optional as  Subscription
confirmation. You could as well say "just whose 'bright' idea was it to not
have digests". See above - contact the owners.
>
>lists which have 100-300 people [...] with maybe 5-10 messages a day.
Again - contact the owners. The  confirmation has deliberately been set. So
you better argue with the person in charge and not woth the whole world.
>
>A PLEA - turn this 'feature' off (or convince me with DATA that  it  was/is
>needed).
A single bad address on a moderate volume mailing list can generate several
hundred pieces of junk-mail before you find  out (if you have n owners make
this times n) - IF YOU ARE  LUCKY that is. Some brain damaged mailers start
posting to your list then and you  can have some nice mailing loop together
with junk in the archives and digests.
THEN you have to block the invalid address. You have to decide whether it's
the host or the user part causing the problems - you don't want to shut out
well-behaving users. It may be that the  address was not yet valid. Or that
whatever caused the problem eventually gets sorted out. You'd then have to
re-enable the access.
With ten lists you can have this  sort of problem several times a week. I'm
not  here to  spend my  time  with this  type of  useless administration  -
period.
 
Personally I don't like the renewal-confirmation. For those lists where
it is set I live with it because I say the owner or postmaster probably
has a reason, ok?
 
Christian