No Easy Way Out For Yahoo! eGroups Subscribers

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Yahoo! Groups, who manages former eGroups mailing lists has a strange policy on unsubscribing people who joined eGroups via e-mail subscription before eGroups have been taken over by Yahoo!--the only way to unsubscribe is to join Yahoo! (giving your full details and a corect e-mail address) and then unsubscribe using the Web interface. The e-mail unubscription feature, although theoretically still available, does not work. Looks like not all Yahoo! Groups subscribers are equal."

Not entirely true.

[ahknight]

I manage several lists. The alternative is to email (listname)[e-mail] and have the owner unsub you from *their* interface. I can kick off anyone I want without them having to hand over any information at all.

Re:Not entirely true.

[FrankHaynes]

...perhaps not true at all. I own several eGroups and just used one to test the subscribe/unsubscribe process entirely by e-mail. I chose a fairly new address that is 'clean'. It worked flawlessly, in fact it was lightning fast!

Admittedly this address was unknown to Yahoo before today, so I cannot comment about long-time eGroups subscribers, but I must say that many of the gloom-and-doom predictions from a year ago about Yahoo's takeover of eGroups turned out to be so much hot air.

Of the three addresses that Yahoo knows about in conjunction with eGroups, none seemed to get junk mail as a result. The one which is posted on several web pages suffers an almost continual onslaught of "horny teenage girls" and "secret stock tips" junk mail, so I just consider that one my throw-away address.

Tempest in a teapot? You be the judge.

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Re:Not entirely true.

[hughk]

I agree, I have a couple of lists there and I have no problems to do manual unsubscribes and address changes.

This is quite important because some of our subscribers have no web access or sit behind a firewall (Hello Goldman-Sachs) that blocks access to Yahoo.

Unsubscribe

[VA Software]

Please remove me from this discussion.

Bug?

[VA Software]

Of course, it could just be a bug in the eGroups software?

Did you think of that and ask Yahoo about it before inventing some bizarre conspiracy theory and posting it to /. to get yourself your 15 minutes?

Perhaps if Yahoo were informed responsibly they would fix it for you.

Re:Bug?

[sulli]

it's not a bug, it's Your Rights Online!! Be very afraid!

Re:Bug?

[FrankHaynes]

The other possibility is the frequent tendency of people to send unsubscribe requests from addresses which are not subscribed to the group. The confirmation e-mail sent by eGroups goes to the subscribed address which might be dead or unread by the subscriber, so the he thinks "Those bastards at Yahoo are locking me in!"

This has to be at the top of the 'common mistake' list. Of course, we all know the #1 mistake of sending 'unsubscribe' to the list address and not the listserv address. ARRRRGHHH!

If the concerned party is an eGroup moderator, go to the group's web page and click on 'Activity' in the panel to the left. It will show you subscription activity, including e-mail requests to unsubscribe. That should verify one way or another what happened. I have seen rare screwups with that mechanism, but I think the address in question in that case had "issues".

To their credit, Yahoo does allow you to specify other addresses for posting and perhaps administering the account via e-mail. I'm sure this is yet another sinister plot to collect addresses, though. :(

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Illegal

[ThePilgrim]

I think this would be illigal in the uk but I can't connect to the Data Protection [dataprotection.gov.uk] web site to check.
IIRC you must supply an easy way to remove someone from a mailing list.

Geocities

[Tuzanor]

yahoo did the same thing with geocities. back a LONG time ago, when i didn't know better(before the annoying ads). i had a geocities site which. I eventually forgot about it. recently, just after yahoo bout geo, i remembered that site and I decided enough was enough, so I tried to remove it, only that my old login/pass didn't work anymore. They said I had to sign up for a yahoo ID to access my site. It was a general headache and eventually i just said screw it.

Thats what

[xMAD.com]

email blocking and filtering is for.

Please remove me from this website I have to get some work done...