Utilities: List Settings: New Subscriber Policy: Confirmation

Confirm Subscribes

Defines whether new members receive a confirmation request when joining the mailing list. The confirmation request will be an email message telling the person that they have requested to join this mailing list, and that the person will have to respond to the confirmation message in order to become a full member. The person will not receive mail from the mailing list until the confirmation is received.

Confirmation serves several purposes. It is quite common for people to mistype their email address when subscribing to a mailing list using the web interface. Without confirmation, ListManager would waste effort trying to send mail to this incorrect address.

Another need for confirmation is to counter a common form of electronic harassment. The harasser will sign someone they wish to harm to many mailing lists (perhaps several hundred), and that person will then be flooded with unwanted electronic mail. If that person's email server is not perfectly configured, the email server may crash, or prohibit other people sharing the email server from receiving their email. At the very least, it will use bandwidth and other resources.

We highly recommend that all open mailing lists use the Confirm feature as this form of electronic harassment is quite common and is very bothersome to the victim.

Confirm Unsubscribes

This setting determines whether email requests to unsubscribe are immediately acted upon by ListManager, or whether it will send a request to the member asking them to confirm that they want to unsubscribe from the list.

The three options for Confirming Unsubscribes are to confirm only questionable unsubscribes, to confirm all unsubscribes, and to never confirm unsubscribes (the default setting).

For announcement lists we strongly recommend that you use the default setting, and that you do not use the setting that requires confirmation of all unsubscribes. Announcement list members will tend to find this extra step frustrating, and may accuse you of being a spammer.

If an unsubscribe confirmation email message is sent, the message will tell the person to reply to the given message, if they want to be unsubscribed, or to ignore the message if they do not want to unsubscribe. Once a person responds to the confirming email to confirm leaving the list, they will receive the ListManager default goodbye message. Members who confirm their unsubscribes will not receive any Goodbye document you specify for the list.

One reason to confirm unsubscribes is that people are sometimes nasty and will try to unsubscribe people that they do not like. They can do this by forging an unsubscribe request and sending it on behalf of that person.

The default is to never confirm unsubscribes. If you are concerned about people unsubscribing others, use the setting that confirms only questionable unsubscribes. With this setting, only when a unsubscribe request comes from an address different from that subscribed to the list will the member receive a confirmation request.