This setting determines whether email requests to
unsubscribe are immediately acted upon by Lyris, or whether Lyris will send a
confirming email message before performing the unsubscribe.
If a confirming email message is
sent, the message will tell the person to reply to the given message if they
want to be unsubscribed, or ignore the message if they do not want to be
unsubscribe.
One reason to confirm unsubscribes
is that people are sometimes nasty, and will try to unsubscribe people that
they do not like. They can do this by forging an unsubscribe request and
sending it on behalf of that person.
Another reason to confirm
unsubscribes is when you are using the "failsafe unsubscribe" mechanism.
This mechanism places the recipient's email address at the bottom of every
posting, and instructs them to forward any posting to
"unsubscribe-listname@…" in order to leave the mailing list. This
works quite well, except it can have a negative effect if someone forwards a
posting from your mailing list on to another mailing list, that forwarded
message will still have the "failsafe unsubscribe" tag in it, and if
some recipient of this forwarded message decides to follow the unsubscribe directions
in that message, they will be unsubscribing the original recipient. For this
reason, Lyris defaults to confirming "questionable unsubscribes",
such as those that would occur in the above scenario. These are unsubscribe
requests where the person being unsubscribed differs from the identity of the
person sending the message.
The three options for Confirming
Unsubscribes are to confirm only questionable unsubscribes (this is the default
setting), to confirm all unsubscribes, and to never confirm unsubscribes. For announcement
lists, we recommend that you use the default setting, and that you do not use
the setting that requires confirmation of all unsubscribes, and announcement
list members will tend to find this extra step frustrating.