Selection differences -> adds and removes

[Jonathan Peterson]

> Sorry about the wide copy here, but we had this one LESS THAN A WEEK 
AGO!
> 
> Has the level of technical competence really declined this far!?

If someone wants to un-sub, they are no longer interested in the list 
contents. So they have stopped reading it, so they have no idea what was 
posted five days, or indeed five minutes ago.

Eventually, for some reason, they stop deleting the irrelevant emails and 
instead decide to un-subscribe. So they look for the unsub info in the 
message footer and don't find it. Then they ask to be unsubscribed.

A fail to see anything but blinding common sense in this approach. I 
realise that the headers contain unsubscribe information. If there was 
some key information that I really wanted to make available to list users, 
the message *headers* wouldn't actually be my first port of call, but hey, 
that decision was doubtless made aeons ago by l33t *nix gods who had never 
had trouble unsubscribing from a list in their lives, and so had no idea 
how best to solve the problem.

"These Lusers can't unsub"
"Yeah, man, it's like - it's like it's always September on the internet 
now"
"Heh, you said that so only l33t people would get the reference. Cool."
"Seriously, we got to do something. Bitching about it is starting to take 
too much time away from me criticising csh"
"I know! I know! I was in the middle of this debate about how that new 
<center> tag from Netscape is destroying the web by not adhereing to 
standards, when this Luser starts asking to be unsubscribed. I had to 
spend like a whole 20 minutes writing a sarcastic, unhelpful response, and 
copying it to the whole list, before I unsubbed him and permanently banned 
his IP address from everywhere. He was AOL lol."
"Heh heh. I got an idea. Maybe if we like put the unsubscribe info in the 
message headers these Lusers might figure it out."
"Yeah, I mean they know nothing about the internet, but even they ought to 
figure out that the SMTP headers have useful meta information related to 
the message, right?!"
"Yeah, no shit. And I mean one day, someone could write a MUA that like, 
had an 'unsubscribe' button that worked on the basis of that list header. 
That would be cool. I mean, it would be easy to do a macro in Pine, 
right?"
"Pine?! D00d, you could do that in mm! I mean, you won't, but you could!"
"That's right! None of the people who could make this feature useful, have 
the need or inclination to do so, and that means they won't! I love free 
software! It ensures Lusers never get features they need. Heh."
"Man, I'm gonna post to comp.net.rfc.trivial and suggest that"
"Yeah, good idea. Copy it to 
alt.usenet.already.obsolete.but.we.pretend.otherwise"
"Kay. Anyway, got to get back to nethack"


Meanwhile, while _your_ email may no longer be any use for business 
purposes, mine certainly is. I use normal Bayesian anti-spam, auto-delete 
the auto-generated name spams, and get about 2-5 spams a day coming 
through. I can conduct business on that basis. My domain is about 5-6 
years old, and the problem is not getting worse, if anything it improves 
slightly over time. Oddly enough, my work email, which I am far more 
profligate with, has even less spam than my private one - although I've 
had that for 4-5 years as well.

> Grngh

And finally, gentlemen, I will outrage the world, with my terrifying 5 
LINE SIGNATURE OF DOOM. Or not.