[Mailman-Users] Preventing accidental resubscription

[Bill Heath]

For most of our lists, we don't do mass subscribes so the only time we
manually do anything is with uncaught bounce messages, which of course
we remove manually if it is a true bounce and not just a malformed out
of office message.

Now for our announce only lists, were we do quite a bit of mass
subscriptions, I allow mailman to handle the bounce processing where it
will and don't worry about it.  I know that there are costs in doing
this, but I believe it is cheaper and easier than having to manually
deal with the situation.  If mailman can't handle the bounce, then I
manually remove the address and keep the address in a text file that
will be used later.  If a user does a simple unsubscribe, or sends an
email to the list-owner, then we will add those addresses to the bounce
file as well.  After we perform any mass subscribe from whatever the
data source, we always do a mass unsubscribe using our text file.  This
removes all the known bounce issues that mailman can't handle and the
people who have told us they don't want our email.

It is not a clean process and it takes a bit of time after each major
mailing, but it works for us and keeps our complaints to a minimum.

Bill Heath
Technical Operations Manager
Sunshine State One Call of Florida, Inc.
11 Plantation Road
DeBary, FL  32713
Phone: (386) 575-2003
Fax: (386) 575-2033
Email:  mailto:bill.heath at mail.callsunshine.com

-----Original Message-----
From: mailman-users-bounces+bill.heath=mail.callsunshine.com at python.org
[mailto:mailman-users-bounces+bill.heath=mail.callsunshine.com at python.or
g] On Behalf Of Darrell Burkey
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 2:46 AM
To: mailman-users at python.org
Subject: [Mailman-Users] Preventing accidental resubscription

I've had a client ask me how they can keep track of who unsubscribes 
from their lists so that they don't accidentally resubscribe the same 
address at some later point.

Seems like just keeping a list of addresses of the unsubscribe notices 
that come in would be reasonable but they made the point that they would

  have to go through all the bounce notices as well to indentify 
addresses that were unsubscribed due to excessive bounces as well.

I've done a fair amount of searching around and haven't seen the topic 
raised although it seems likely that it would have been.

Unless anyone has any better advice I'm consider writinging a hack to 
copy unsubscribe addresses to a file that can be checked before 
subscribing someone.

How do others handle this?

Thanks in advance from downunder.
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