How to fix someone else's idiocy online.
October 27, 2010 10:48 AM Subscribe
How do I (openly or covertly) rectify a problem with people responding to all on a email listserv that I'm a member of?
So I'm a member of a listserv from an organization I was previously involved in and am now an alumni of. The main purpose of the list is ambiguous and open to whatever you think might be of use to the others. I'd say 95% of the traffic on the website is apartment sub-leases, various ticket/book sales/requests, and job openings/resume trading and so forth.
It's great, I've benefited and used it in the past and glance at the subject line of every email that comes from the list. Now the problem, while most of the users are kind/considerate/thinking human beings some are not. Let me interject this as well, by the very nature of membership in the list you are known to have a decent bit of experience with technology and basic email usage, this isn't a knitting circle or bridge club listserv.
The problem basically occurs about once or twice a day when someone uses the reply button instead of noting and replying to the email address of the person in question thereby spamming the entire list with a question concerning 'how many bathrooms are in the appartment?' or 'what row are the tickets in?'.
I, along with other members, have tried to inform the people that do this of what their doing and/or implement a basic subject line policy for friendly filtering of emails to no avail.
I don't want to see this listserv go down the drain since it provides some pretty handy functionality in a very casual, nonchalant manner so I'm asking the hive for options regarding either a) fixing the problem harmlessly or b) showing me a way to apply negative consequences to those people that are the main offenders when I all know is their email address.
Concerning B specifically, I was wondering if there was a way I could submit the email address of the people in question to scambaiters or spam email lists. It doesn't necessarily fix anything but man I would feel 1000% times better knowing that they aren't just flooding our inboxes with zero repercussion.
So I'm a member of a listserv from an organization I was previously involved in and am now an alumni of. The main purpose of the list is ambiguous and open to whatever you think might be of use to the others. I'd say 95% of the traffic on the website is apartment sub-leases, various ticket/book sales/requests, and job openings/resume trading and so forth.
It's great, I've benefited and used it in the past and glance at the subject line of every email that comes from the list. Now the problem, while most of the users are kind/considerate/thinking human beings some are not. Let me interject this as well, by the very nature of membership in the list you are known to have a decent bit of experience with technology and basic email usage, this isn't a knitting circle or bridge club listserv.
The problem basically occurs about once or twice a day when someone uses the reply button instead of noting and replying to the email address of the person in question thereby spamming the entire list with a question concerning 'how many bathrooms are in the appartment?' or 'what row are the tickets in?'.
I, along with other members, have tried to inform the people that do this of what their doing and/or implement a basic subject line policy for friendly filtering of emails to no avail.
I don't want to see this listserv go down the drain since it provides some pretty handy functionality in a very casual, nonchalant manner so I'm asking the hive for options regarding either a) fixing the problem harmlessly or b) showing me a way to apply negative consequences to those people that are the main offenders when I all know is their email address.
Concerning B specifically, I was wondering if there was a way I could submit the email address of the people in question to scambaiters or spam email lists. It doesn't necessarily fix anything but man I would feel 1000% times better knowing that they aren't just flooding our inboxes with zero repercussion.
The listhost whatsit my school used had a way to blacklist, graylist, and whitelist certain email addresses. Some people had free reign to email the list whatever they wanted, some people (very, very few) could not email at all (and had to send a private email to a moderator to get something posted), and most people (the graylist) had to wait for a mod to click OK on an email before it got sent. Does your program have anything like that? You could put the problem guys on the graylist and their responses would have to be okayed before they could post. (It creates more work for you, but you have to decide for yourself which you find less annoying.
posted by phunniemee at 10:55 AM on October 27, 2010
posted by phunniemee at 10:55 AM on October 27, 2010
Sorry, failed to preview.
posted by phunniemee at 10:57 AM on October 27, 2010
posted by phunniemee at 10:57 AM on October 27, 2010
Best answer: Given that evil does seem to be an option, could you set up about 150 sockpuppets, put the offenders on the address line along with all of your puppets, and then have a really lengthy backwards and forwards reply to all conversation about the practice and ethics of emailing?
posted by Ahab at 10:59 AM on October 27, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by Ahab at 10:59 AM on October 27, 2010 [1 favorite]
Can your listserv software do anything with the Reply-To field of the messages it sends out? Ideally, you would want to set it to the address where the messages orginate from, so that conversation is automatically routed to the correct party. Otherwise, set it to a dummy address or, better yet, to a dedicated address with an auto-responder explaining you are not supposed to reply directly to messages in this list.
Other than that I would find plan B to be a very Bad Idea, and generally dickish on your part. Replying to a mailing list message is not a bad thing as such, but rather depends on the list policy. Punishing people for making this kind of mistake is what gives sysadmins a bad name, doubly if the list is not plastered all over with huge blinking messages to this effect.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:02 AM on October 27, 2010
Other than that I would find plan B to be a very Bad Idea, and generally dickish on your part. Replying to a mailing list message is not a bad thing as such, but rather depends on the list policy. Punishing people for making this kind of mistake is what gives sysadmins a bad name, doubly if the list is not plastered all over with huge blinking messages to this effect.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:02 AM on October 27, 2010
without help from the mods, I can't imagine that there is much you can do.
If you figure out a foolproof way of making things fool proof, you'll be a rich man (and we should be friends.)
If you are somehow able to obtain administrative help, this problem would be solved by having the mailing list server explicitly set the "Reply-To" header to be the value of the original sender's From: Address.
However, even assuming you are able to obtain administrative assistance, you may encounter resistance to this change. You see, this is a big hairy issue for people who run mailing lists (like me) and some of us do not believe that it is correct for the mailing list to explicitly set Reply-To at all. But far and away the most common thing for a mailing list server to do is to explicitly set Reply-To to be the list address - and this is the behavior you want to get them to change.
(or, on Preview, what Dr. Dracator said)
posted by namewithoutwords at 11:06 AM on October 27, 2010
If you figure out a foolproof way of making things fool proof, you'll be a rich man (and we should be friends.)
If you are somehow able to obtain administrative help, this problem would be solved by having the mailing list server explicitly set the "Reply-To" header to be the value of the original sender's From: Address.
However, even assuming you are able to obtain administrative assistance, you may encounter resistance to this change. You see, this is a big hairy issue for people who run mailing lists (like me) and some of us do not believe that it is correct for the mailing list to explicitly set Reply-To at all. But far and away the most common thing for a mailing list server to do is to explicitly set Reply-To to be the list address - and this is the behavior you want to get them to change.
(or, on Preview, what Dr. Dracator said)
posted by namewithoutwords at 11:06 AM on October 27, 2010
As the list is not yours, you have no ability to fix the list software to behave correctly, and no business punishing anyone for what you deem to be their misbehavior. I suggest you set up a filter that deletes anything from the list that seems to be a reply (subject starts with Re:") but is not specifically addressed to you. Or else set up an alternate mailing list which you can moderate to your own standards.
posted by kindall at 11:08 AM on October 27, 2010 [6 favorites]
posted by kindall at 11:08 AM on October 27, 2010 [6 favorites]
Best answer: You're talking about technically competent people who are responding to the entire list when they want to make a specific inquiry.
Odds are, these people already know that they should reply to one person specifically, which means you're getting one of two things: accidents or malice.
Neither of those are correctable by you. Accidents are going to happen. Even if they only happen .1% of the time, if you have 150 people on the email list, you're still talking about an inadvertent reply-all every 10 messages or so. If people are either intentionally doing this to annoy you or, at the very least, willfully careless with respect to who they send the emails to, you're stuck.
So what's left?
Technical solutions and administrative solutions. You've ruled out the latter. If the listserv is mostly for use-cases where reply-all is a bad idea, the best idea is to change the listserv settings to make replies go to the sender and not the list. This is a setting in every major, worthwhile mailing list software. If you can't or won't pursue that as an option, and you haven't been able to figure out a way to get rid of replies, your last remaining solution is just to filter emails from the worst offenders.
Sadly, there's no magic trick to make this go away.
posted by toomuchpete at 11:12 AM on October 27, 2010 [2 favorites]
Odds are, these people already know that they should reply to one person specifically, which means you're getting one of two things: accidents or malice.
Neither of those are correctable by you. Accidents are going to happen. Even if they only happen .1% of the time, if you have 150 people on the email list, you're still talking about an inadvertent reply-all every 10 messages or so. If people are either intentionally doing this to annoy you or, at the very least, willfully careless with respect to who they send the emails to, you're stuck.
So what's left?
Technical solutions and administrative solutions. You've ruled out the latter. If the listserv is mostly for use-cases where reply-all is a bad idea, the best idea is to change the listserv settings to make replies go to the sender and not the list. This is a setting in every major, worthwhile mailing list software. If you can't or won't pursue that as an option, and you haven't been able to figure out a way to get rid of replies, your last remaining solution is just to filter emails from the worst offenders.
Sadly, there's no magic trick to make this go away.
posted by toomuchpete at 11:12 AM on October 27, 2010 [2 favorites]
I forgot to mention, assume no administrative privileges are available and cannot be obtained. No mods are available to rescue/punish/inform/etc.
And no change of scenes either, it's this listserv or the highway.
Why is it impossible to move to a different listserv? If it's to the point where you want report people for spam who are clearly not spammers, then it seems like making an Unofficial Moderated Listserv would be a much less drastic choice. Just start signing all of your emails to this list with a link to subscribe to your alternative listserv and if people like your moderated version better then they will start using that instead.
posted by burnmp3s at 11:13 AM on October 27, 2010 [1 favorite]
And no change of scenes either, it's this listserv or the highway.
Why is it impossible to move to a different listserv? If it's to the point where you want report people for spam who are clearly not spammers, then it seems like making an Unofficial Moderated Listserv would be a much less drastic choice. Just start signing all of your emails to this list with a link to subscribe to your alternative listserv and if people like your moderated version better then they will start using that instead.
posted by burnmp3s at 11:13 AM on October 27, 2010 [1 favorite]
I used to belong to a listserv that is very similar to yours, in terms of being a place for tech-savvy org members to announce jobs, apartment rentals, things for sale, etc. Once I accidentally replied-all to something when I meant to privately email the sender, and was promptly publicly scolded/humiliated for it by another member. As a result, I (and many other people) quit the listserv because seriously, WTF.
I suggest that you NOT take a similar route of punishment or humiliation if you truly want to see this listserv survive. There are more important things to get worried about than this. Plus, you'll just come across as a busybody if you're merely a member and not actually an admin.
One possible idea? Privately emailing people who make this mistake and simply telling them "I'm glad you find this listserv helpful. Next time please directly email the sender instead of replying to everyone. This reduces the chances of cluttering everyone's inboxes. Thanks!"
posted by joan_holloway at 11:26 AM on October 27, 2010
I suggest that you NOT take a similar route of punishment or humiliation if you truly want to see this listserv survive. There are more important things to get worried about than this. Plus, you'll just come across as a busybody if you're merely a member and not actually an admin.
One possible idea? Privately emailing people who make this mistake and simply telling them "I'm glad you find this listserv helpful. Next time please directly email the sender instead of replying to everyone. This reduces the chances of cluttering everyone's inboxes. Thanks!"
posted by joan_holloway at 11:26 AM on October 27, 2010
Response by poster: Replies to common themes:
1) Changing the "reply to" behavior is not an option. Attempts by myself and various other members to get the owners of the listserv to do anything whatsoever (even in some cases to remove their own email from the list) is met with zero response. The white/black/grey list seems ideal. How I long for the +/- system to be implemented in more places too, that would quickly and efficiently go a long way towards solving these issues...
2) This is still 'the' listserv that a certain subset of people use, are blindly encouraged by organizational administrators to use (despite being notified of the shortcomings/problems) , and will continue to use. Migration by a current subset of members only accomplishes to cut off the people who leave from the up-to-date information from that area and might effectively neuter both, old and new.
3) I can fix my problem, that's understood... gmail + correct filter solves my issue. However it stinks because of the losses that are known to occur due to people being tired of having to deal with something that should not be an issue in the first place.
Yet again, I understand it's not 'my' list nor 'my' responsibility and that the nuclear option of plan B is a dick move, but I was hoping there was some sort of solution here besides 'grin and bear it'.
It's just compounded due to the fact that the problem emails tend to come from the same people who are (at this point) beyond 'Oops that was an accident, let me be more careful in the future because 18 people sounded off against me while god knows how many I made waste their time for no reason' and are facing no repercussions whatsoever.
Sounds like I'm not the first to hit this issue head on. Really I just threw in option B because I have also always wanted to have a way to submit the emails of real scamers/spammerbots to their colleagues (other scamers/spammers) and figured I might kill 2 birds with one stone with this question. I forget the name of the website but I (demented me, I know) get a kick out of the people that personally take on the issue by scambaiting the scammers all over the place.... Here it is... but that's another deal altogether...
Thanks all.
posted by RolandOfEld at 12:03 PM on October 27, 2010
1) Changing the "reply to" behavior is not an option. Attempts by myself and various other members to get the owners of the listserv to do anything whatsoever (even in some cases to remove their own email from the list) is met with zero response. The white/black/grey list seems ideal. How I long for the +/- system to be implemented in more places too, that would quickly and efficiently go a long way towards solving these issues...
2) This is still 'the' listserv that a certain subset of people use, are blindly encouraged by organizational administrators to use (despite being notified of the shortcomings/problems) , and will continue to use. Migration by a current subset of members only accomplishes to cut off the people who leave from the up-to-date information from that area and might effectively neuter both, old and new.
3) I can fix my problem, that's understood... gmail + correct filter solves my issue. However it stinks because of the losses that are known to occur due to people being tired of having to deal with something that should not be an issue in the first place.
Yet again, I understand it's not 'my' list nor 'my' responsibility and that the nuclear option of plan B is a dick move, but I was hoping there was some sort of solution here besides 'grin and bear it'.
It's just compounded due to the fact that the problem emails tend to come from the same people who are (at this point) beyond 'Oops that was an accident, let me be more careful in the future because 18 people sounded off against me while god knows how many I made waste their time for no reason' and are facing no repercussions whatsoever.
Sounds like I'm not the first to hit this issue head on. Really I just threw in option B because I have also always wanted to have a way to submit the emails of real scamers/spammerbots to their colleagues (other scamers/spammers) and figured I might kill 2 birds with one stone with this question. I forget the name of the website but I (demented me, I know) get a kick out of the people that personally take on the issue by scambaiting the scammers all over the place.... Here it is... but that's another deal altogether...
Thanks all.
posted by RolandOfEld at 12:03 PM on October 27, 2010
You might be able to get really close to what you want by using a compound rule in gmail.
When you create the filter, it should have two components: a way to identify mail to that listserv and a way to know that it's someone replying to and not originating a message. Something like:
to address is: list@serv.com
and
subject contains: re:
I think this gets you right where you want to be: only getting the original messages.
posted by desl at 5:58 PM on October 27, 2010
When you create the filter, it should have two components: a way to identify mail to that listserv and a way to know that it's someone replying to and not originating a message. Something like:
to address is: list@serv.com
and
subject contains: re:
I think this gets you right where you want to be: only getting the original messages.
posted by desl at 5:58 PM on October 27, 2010
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And no change of scenes either, it's this listserv or the highway.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:50 AM on October 27, 2010