Instruction in welcome message ambiguous

[M Hickford]

When you subscribe / are subscribed to a mailing list, you received the 'Welcome to the "X" mailing list' message. It starts with the following:

    Welcome to the X@Y mailing list!
    To post to this list, send your email to:
        X@Y

Users who aren't familiar with mailing lists sometimes interpret 'email' as 'email address' and reason: 'To confirm I want to join the list I need to send a message containing my email address to X@Y', and then reply to the welcome message with an otherwise blank message but for a copy of their email address.

While this reason may amuse experienced users, many otherwise competent computer users have never used a mailing list before (or even know what one is) and jump to it easily. While amusing at first, such replies are mostly irritating.

This happens on several lists at my university each year when freshers join. The behaviour is infectious, after one person replies to the welcome message with '<email address hidden>', other new users follow suit, and everyone in the list ends up with about fifty of these messages.

I propose the text "To post to this list, send your email to:" is changed to either "To post a message to subscribers of this list: send your message to:" (A), or simply "To post to this list, send your message to:" (B). This explains how to use the mailing list unambiguously to new users, and will reduce email frustration worldwide.

[M Hickford (hickford)]

Fix suggest above would reduce incidents of users posting their passwords to the mailing list as described in https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/266287, without filtering out legit. messages.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

This is a duplicate of SF bug number 2081096 <http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2081096&group_id=103&atid=100103> which unhappily is one of many that for unknown reasons weren't migrated to launchpad.

It is fixed for Mailman 2.2, and can be fixed in the interim by a list owner for the owner's list by editing the "Welcome email text file" on the "Edit the public HTML pages and text files" page on the web admin interface, or by a site admin by making a site default edited version of the subscribeack.txt template per <http://wiki.list.org/x/jYA9>.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

I have the LP bug import guy looking into the missing issues. Mark, can you open a separate bug on that and include any SF bug ids for issues you know weren't imported? I can then assign that to the LP guy so that he can re-run the import.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

Missing items opened as Bug #294223. I'll work on compiling a list of the missing.

[M Hickford (hickford)]

Great! Thanks Mark