[Mailman-Users] mailman sending password reminders to members no longer subscribed

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jim Dory writes:

 > I've gotten a couple complaints today from ex-members on our subscription
 > only mailman list

What do you mean by "subscription only"?  That's not a term we define
as far as I know.

 > after they received password reminders. They are not subscribed,

How do you know that?  The users say so?  They don't appear in the
membership list in the user interface?

 > so I can't honor their request to be removed from the mailing list.

Well, they're subscribed *somewhere*.  Generally speaking, there are
two possibilities.  First is that in the process of an upgrade, you
ended up with two installations, one of which is basically dormant
except for sending out password reminders or something.  Are any users
reporting duplicate reminders?  If not, this is probably not the
case.  On the other hand, if some users are not getting reminders at
all, you probably do have a redundant installation that's still
active.

The second is that these users didn't unsubscribe the addresses that
are receiving the password reminders.  One possibility is that they
set their addresses to "no mail" rather than unsubscribing, which
would explain not receiving posts but receiving reminders.  A second
is that they had multiple addresses for the purpose of posting, but
all but one were set to "no mail", and the users didn't unsubscribe
their post-only addresses.

In a stock Mailman installation the reminder message is addressed to
the subscribed address in "To" in the header and the subscribed
address is also present in the body.  Ask these users to check that
these addresses are the one they unsubscribed.  Note that users may
have changed their preferred addresses, but are still receiving
reminders at the old address via some kind of forwarding setting.

Finally, it's possible that these messages aren't from Mailman at all,
but some kind of spoof to get them to click on a link.  Highly
unlikely, I guess, but to be complete I mention it.

Steve