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 new member's status will be set to confirm until the confirmation response is received, and the person will not receive mail from the mailing list until the confirmation is received.

The reply-to email address given in the subscription confirmation request message will be a unique address for that member. You may want to include this address in the body of a customized confirm document you send out. Thus, the reply-to address is constructed by using the following text:

lyris-confirm-%%memberidchar%%@yourdomain.com

This failsafe confirm address allows a member to reply to a single confirmation request and confirm their membership for all their lists. The contents of the reply is irrelevant, so long as it is addressed to the confirm address.

If a member visits your Web site and signs up for four of your lists, you can have ListManager send the new member a single confirmation message for all four lists by using the "oneconfirm" option of the "add" command. When the member replies to this one confirmation request message, the reply will go to the failsafe confirmation address. When ListManager receives mail at this address, ListManager will confirm all outstanding confirmation requests for that member. Prospective members cannot confirm to some lists but not others.

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.

The Confirmation feature blocks this form of electronic harassment. If the harasser subscribes someone to 100 ListManager mailing lists (all with Confirm set to Yes), the person will receive 100 confirmation messages but no further messages. If the person does not respond to the subscription confirmation messages (as they should not), the memberships will not be activated.

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.

Another reason to confirm unsubscribes is when you are using the "failsafe unsubscribe" %%email.unsub%% address in your message. This mechanism places the recipient's email address and unsubscribe email address at the bottom of their message. If someone forwards this message to another, that person could unsubscribe the subscriber by following the unsubscribe instructions in the message.

Because most lists are not subject to this problem, 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.

1. Utilities: List Settings: New Subscriber Policy

1. Utilities: List Settings: New Subscriber Policy: Security