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[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 02 June 2006 12:15, Chris Neary wrote:

> Do people sign up to the list not even knowing what this is?

Yup, that about sums it up nicely.

Long version: An average user tries Ubuntu and likes it. From 
somewhere or other they find that there's a user list and they 
subscribe to it, not really reading and comprehending what it's all 
about. For the next week ubuntu-users dumps 300 messages a day in 
their inbox which from their point of view is rather ... unexpected.

Me and you know all about mailing lists, but Aunt Tillie actually 
doesn't know much at all and just gets overwhelmed by the traffic. 
There's an interesting parallel in one of Richard Bach's early books: 
he lists *5* *pages* of text on all the signs hanging up in an 
average airport, then a conversation between a confused traveller and 
an airport employee who says "Just read the signs, they tell you 
where to go." Imagine this: traveller looks around and wonders "So 
which one of the 14,538 signs that I can see right now is the one I'm 
supposed to read?......"

Best response to the original poster is to send them a mail off-list 
with the unsubscribe link and explain in one sentence that they have 
to do it themselves.

p.s. Jens, this doesn't mean you are the average user above. It's 
about people posting unsubscribe messages in general.

-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five