Forum FAQ - Taking a break / Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing

To unsubscribe from the Forum, send a blank message to forum-unsubscribe@greenbelt-forum.org.uk

You may be sent a confirmation token: if so, follow the instructions that come with it. Please do not send "please unsubscribe me" messages to the list or anywhere else, as they will be ignored.

Taking a break

When you go away on holiday, it is quite common, particularly with work addresses, to set up an auto-reply system. If you do this, you must ensure that it is configured not to reply to list messages. The easiest method is for it only to reply to messages which are addressed personally to you, though there are sometimes other "clues" in the message headers which can be used to spot a mailing list message. Some auto-reply systems limit themselves to personally addressed mail, and/or look for the other clues. Unfortunately, though, most don't bother and will reply to everything that arrives in your inbox. Even worse is that most will reply to the original sender of the message. The typical outcome is that you will arrive back from holiday to find you've been forcibly removed from the mailing lists.

If you cannot configure your auto-reply appropriately, or if you want to stop receiving Forum emails temporarily for any other reason, send:

set forum nomail

as the body of a message to majordomo@greenbelt-forum.org.uk; when you return, send:

set forum nomail-return

and everything will return to normal. This is easier than the alternative of unsubscribing and then subscribing again, although you can of course do that if you prefer.

If you have a space limit on your email account, please also unsubscribe or set "nomail" before going away for any length of time.

When you return, you can catch up on the messages you have missed by fetching them from the archive.

If, when sending a forum message, you receive any auto-replies or errors which seem to be due to a problem at another Forum member's site, please forward them to the list manager at owner-forum@greenbelt-forum.org.uk for investigation. Usually all automated messages come to the list manager anyway, so for anybody else to receive one indicates a problem in itself, that needs to be reported to the administrators at the other member's site.

(Incidently, some mailing lists, though not the Forum, send out individually-addressed emails to all their members, which nearly always triggers an auto-reply. For those lists you nearly always have to unsubscribe whenever you plan to use an auto-reply.)

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