[Mailman-Users] Can I diable auto subscribe/unsubscribe ?

[Dragon]

Dongsheng Song sent the message below at 07:24 PM 8/13/2006:

>I have a private maillist, maintenance manually. Can I forbid anyone
>auto subscribe/unsubscribe ?
>
>Tanks for some help
---------------- End original message. ---------------------

There is a philosophical issue behind this that you need to really 
think about when making your decision on how to set up a list.

Are you currently using the mailman mailing list software?

If so, you can control these things through the subscribe_policy and 
unsubscribe_policy settings on the Privacy Options page of the web interface.

You can set subscription to require moderator approval or to require 
both approval and confirmation. In your case, I think you would just 
want to set it to approval only without the confirmation.

While you can set the unsubscription policy to require moderator 
approval, I really think that this should only be done in very 
limited circumstances. The only legitimate reason I can think of to 
do so is if this were a list maintained by an employer for the 
purpose of conducting internal business and certain employees were 
required to receive the correspondence from that list as part of 
their job duties.

In any other case I can think of, the unsubscription policy should be 
set to allow users to unsubscribe at will (the "no" setting). Think 
about how you would feel if you were in a position where you joined a 
list and then could not leave it when you wished. It is a rather 
unwelcome and unfriendly thing to do.

I run a few small lists, there are a couple of public ones open to 
anyone who wishes to join and there are a couple of private ones 
requiring moderator approval for subscription. None of those lists 
requires approval to leave, anyone is free to stop receiving mail at 
any time from those lists and this is how it generally ought to be.

Dragon

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