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Confirming your
subscription request
Before your
subscription can be started, you must
confirm your subscription request. Our
list server will you a confirmation email
which you must reply to in order to
confirm your request to be subscribed to
the McCoyPottery.Com mailing lists.
Why do we require you
to confirm subscriptions? It's a bit of a
hassle, but on the Internet, it's
unfortunately a necessary one. Forging
someone else's e-mail address is fairly
easy to do, and a common attack on users
is to forge their e-mail address and
subscribe them to dozens or hundreds of
mailing lists. As you can probably
imagine, the amount of e-mail this
generates can easily swamp a user, and the
hassle of trying to untangle an account
can be immense.
As responsible list
administrators, we don't want our sites to
be used for these kinds of attacks. As a
user, you definitely do not
want to be on the wrong end of one of
these attacks. Mail-back confirmation, the
process we use, is one of the few systems
available where we can guarantee that the
user of an e-mail address is the person
who made the subscription request.
Here's how our
confirmation system works: when you
request a subscription, our server will
process it and send you, at the address
you requested subscribed, a confirmation
email.
The confirmation email
looks like this:
- From:
[email protected]
- Date: April 9,
2004 10:04:11 PM CDT
- Subject:
Mccoypottery-talk -- confirmation of
subscription -- request 861945
- To:
[email protected]
- Reply-To:
[email protected]
Mccoypottery-talk --
confirmation of subscription -- request
861945
We have received a
request from [email protected] for
subscription of your
email address,
<[email protected]>, to
the
[email protected]
mailing list. To confirm the
request, please send
a message to
[email protected],
and either:
- maintain the
subject line as is (the reply's
additional "Re:" is
ok),
- or include the
following line - and only the following
line - in the
message body:
confirm
861945
(Simply sending a
'reply' to this message should work
from most email
interfaces, since
that usually leaves the subject line in
the right
form.)
If you do not wish
to subscribe to this list, please
simply disregard
this message. Send
questions to
[email protected].
Common confirmation problems (and
how to solve them)
There are a few very
common problems users have while trying to
confirm their subscriptions. Here are some
hints on how to avoid them:
- Replying with a
email other than the one your
subscribed with. Do not change your
email address or reply with an email
different from the one you subscribed
with.
- Changing, deleting
or adding text to the confirmation
email. Do not modify any of the data
in the comfirmation email! If you
change the list name or e-mail address
in the confirmation email, they'll no
longer match the information kept on
our server, so the authorization will
fail. If either the list name or
address are incorrect, throw out the
authorization request and start over
with the correct data.
If you have problems
making the confirmation process work,
please contact
us and we'll
help you work through your problems.
Please note, however, that for your own
protection we can't circumvent the
confirmation process -- there
are
e-mail forgers out there brazen enough to
send mail asking admins to circumvent
their own security measures, and
unfortunately, it works more often than
you might think.
We want to help you get
subscribed, but we have to be somewhat
paranoid about e-mail attacks and
forgeries. Please understand we're doing
this not to create problems, but to avoid
them -- for you and for us -- and work
with us. Until better ways to verify the
validity of e-mail and addresses, we have
to be very careful about adding users to
mailing lists. It may seem we're being
bureaucratic at times, but in reality,
we're simply trying to protect people from
the idiots out there. We wish this weren't
necessary, but it is.
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