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."

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.

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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