I now have more sympathy for the people that flood listservs with “unsubscribe me” messages. I’ve been trying to sign off a listserv for a couple weeks. The normal way of signing off doesn’t seem to work because I technically have a couple e-mail addresses, a firstname.lastname e-mail address and a partialname# e-mail address. My outgoing mail seems to be sent out as firstname.lastname, and when I send the command to sign off the list, I get a message that I’m not able to unsubscribe. So I follow the procedures to send a message to the listserv administrator. I’ve sent a message to the listserv administrator 3 times asking to be removed and gotten no response.
Meanwhile, I get a message in my inbox saying that I’ve been subscribed
to an ALA listerv because I’m attending a pre conference. It is great that ALA is doing more stuff online, but I don’t think signing people up for a listerv without their consent is very cool. If I set an out of office e-mail auto reply, it is yet another listserv I have to unsubscribe from and then resubscribe to later as I embark on my massive road trip to illinois in June. In this case, I would really prefer something like a blog that I could visit when I felt like it.
One solution would be to just start a generic e-mail account when subscribing to listservs, or using bloglines to get all my stuff from ala, but part of me likes subscribing to stuff like this through my work e-mail simply because it is easier for me to distinguish between work and nonwork communication.
9:21 am on June 1st, 2005 1
This drives me crazy about ALA. I learned that I was elected to Council because I was automagically subscribed to the Council listserv at an email address I did NOT want to receive mailing list email at.
ALA acts like everyone has one work address and one personal address and you should expect that your work address is going to be deluged with spam and lists and whatever. Don’t even get me started about how much junk mail I got from them when I registered for a press pass for an ALA conference.
I’m not even sure who you talk to about this stupid practice of automatically signing people up like this. If ALA had a really good privacy policy, maybe this would violate it. There IS a membership meeting that has a new low quorum, so maybe you could go to that [I plan to be there] and bring this up? I’ll have your back, for certain.
3:56 pm on June 1st, 2005 2
I have no idea yet what my schedule is for ALA but I’ll try to see if I can attend the membership meeting you mentioned. I think I’ll try to take it up with ACRL (it was the Instruction Section of ACRL that subscribed me to the list). I’ve had a ton of “did you get this message” noise flood my inbox from that list today. Nothing I wanted to have to weed through on top of everything else I have to deal with in my work e-mail.