My computing background is steeped in 8-bit processors. Perhaps as a result of that I still feel the need to obsessively count bytes and shrink disk usage and network traffic.

Recently I wondered how much mail is hitting my mail server that isn’t actually going anywhere but is still consuming bandwidth and processing time – and not just for my servers but for all the intermediate hosts the mail passes through en route.

I thus set up a “catch all” mailbox whereby ordinarily undeliverable e-mail can be inspected. The result after a few days was a surprising “who’s who” of former employees.

I have spam filtering in place, but the sizeable quantity of messages facing me were legitimately subscribed-to mailing lists. They varied from Government announcements about legislation variations to share trading to holidays to pyjamas and lingerie shops.

It would have been easy to consider that an interesting experiment and revert e-mail processing back to normal. Yet, my conscience impressed me to think of the good of the Internet – imagine hordes of e-mail being sent purely into the ether with no viable destination. Could I unsubscribe from every one of these mailing lists, I wondered? Surely the results would reduce the burden on the senders systems and on my systems? Could I achieve zero undeliverable messages?

Now, some newsletters made things easy. They contained unsubscribe links which encoded the e-mail address used. Clicking them took me to the sender’s web site and announced the address had been removed, sometimes asking for feedback why, and giving an option to resubscribe if the link had been inadvertently clicked.

These were pleasant and straightforward, although some required persistence. TicketMaster continued to send messages for some time after unsubscribing. I continued to click the unsubscribe link and eventually time and repetition paid off.

Others were not so helpful. Some writers – generally retail outlets – had “mailto:” unsubscribe links. That is, the link to unsubscribe did not direct to a web site but rather simply invoked a blank e-mail message that I had to send.

There was no guidance given as to what was expected or even if a human or machine would process the message. I’d thus simply write “UNSUBSCRIBE” followed by the e-mail address that the message had been sent to and hope for the best.

Several messages did offer the helpful – but exasperating – note that unsubscribe e-mails had to be sent from the address that was on file. This was a nuisance because obviously it was not the original recipient – with their now defunct mailbox – writing back. Worse, many of the senders who dictated this actually suppressed the addresses of their recipients. In other words, I couldn’t tell simply by looking at the message who the actual recipient address was anyway.

---

One such example is the New South Wales (NSW) Industrial Relations (IR) department who send a weekly IR update as well as regular industrial agreement updates as they happen. They even go so far as to say “our e-mail must be sent from the address you subscribed from, which is noted above” – but it is not.

The only visible “To:” address on the e-mail is their own Email.Updates @ services.nsw.gov.au and I had to delve deeper to find just which address their mailings had been sent to. It is not listed in the body of the e-mail or the visible headers at all.

Some organisations provide a link to unsubscribe but require the user logs in to “manage their e-mail notification preferences.”

One example is Peter Alexander, the popular purveyor of nightwares. Obviously, I had no way of logging in to accounts on their site but the ever helpful “forgotten password” link kindly sent me a new password.

I could now log in to Peter Alexander as several former female employees. Turning off e-mail notifications was simple but wasn’t entirely satisfying. Knowing that an invalid e-mail address is sitting in a database is the type of thing that keeps me up at night. However, as the e-mail address was the username Peter Alexander did not offer any way to blank it out. Nor was there an option to delete the account.

Fortuitously I did know the new e-mail address of one of the ladies. You can see where I intended to take that; I thought I could update the account and provide a seamless transition for them.

Peter Alexander’s site developers may never have considered customers might have reason to change e-mail address, however.

Although the e-mail address is presented as an editable field – along with phone number and address – the site complains if you try to change it. It has to stay as it is forever and ever.

Nevertheless, I achieved one goal – I stopped the messages being sent from the source, but yet Peter Alexander’s disks now contain several invalid accounts. They’ll never be logged in to again. They contain e-mail addresses that aren’t active. Presumably, too, if those ladies wish to shop at Peter Alexander again they must sign up new accounts – and lose their previous on-line order history.

One previous employee had just hired a car from Avis. I know this because Avis kindly sent an e-mail with the details of their booking. Like Peter Alexander, Avis require logging in before being able to modify notifications. However, the username is not the e-mail address but instead a customer number. Which, incidentally, is half starred out with asterisks on the e-mail notification.

This means Avis effectively ensures only the account holder can log in to their account; the forgotten password facility required this secure identifier which I did not know.

That works when tech-savvy people – like iTWire readers – remember to update their online accounts when contact information changes, but clearly fails when they don’t. Short of writing to the recipient, by post, and requesting they update their own information my goal of achieving zero undeliverable e-mail was thwarted by Avis.

Fortunately financial institutions were more amenable. Several share-trading sites also required logging in with a sensitive identifier which was not displayed in e-mail, but they all quickly and kindly responded to e-mails from me advising that their customers no longer worked at my organisation.

In the end, I think I managed a successful result. I achieved some sort of nerd nirvana where what was once a torrent of hundreds of mailing list messages each day has now slowed down to just a couple of new ones every so often.

Pleasantly, the bulk of mailing lists did have a successfully-working means of opting-out of e-mailed communications, but even so Avis is still going to be a problem. My mind is disturbed that Peter Alexander has invalid addresses on file, and I still think the NSW IR department has a considerable degree of cheek telling me to write from a specific e-mail address which they say “is noted above” but is not.

To my mind there’s a lesson to anyone creating a distribution list. One of the first questions in your mind must be how will people get off that mailing list – and not just the individual in question but employers too.