Trouble unsubscribing

Occasionally you get a member who is having trouble unsubscribing, by the time they've got round to contacting the mods team they may be quite irate as a result of numerous unsuccessful attempts to unsubscribe. They'll probably be on individual messages and be completly swamped with posts. They almost certainly won't grasp that unsubscribing from a yahoo group is an automated process that doesn't in any way require input from the moderators.

The best way to unsubscribe someone is via Modtools if you use this, and search on approved members, then when you delete a membership it will remove any associated ones with it. When you have removed it you can sync the membership lists to clear it throughout the sytem.

If you use Yahoo only here are Yahoo's very comprehensive instructions on how to unsubscribe:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/manage/manage-26.html

Some reasons a member may be having trouble unsubscribing (and some solutions)

http://i610.photobucket.com/albums/tt181/dorothyjeanquinn/Unsubscribechart.png

• They just really can't figure out how to do it (Yahoo isn't the most intuitive interface)

• They've set up two accounts with the same email address and have only unsubscribed from one

The first thing to do when a member is having trouble unsubscribing is to have a look for them on your membership list. In the above situations, when you do search in members you should see them. In which case you can either remove them yourself or send them instructions on how to do it.

If they don't appear in your members list, it could be for a number of reasons:

• they've managed to unsubscribe from your Freegle group but are still subscribed to others

• they've subscribed with an email address other than the one they're emailing you with

• they are unaware of, or haven't accounted for Yahoo's delays (It can take up to three days for Yahoo group posts to stop arriving but usually its pretty instant)

• It's a Yahoo glitch (these are surprisingly common actually)

So if you can't see them on your members list, first of all ask them if they are emailing you from the email account that gets the Freegle posts, and then ask them to forward you one or even some of the posts. This will enable you to eliminate the first two options.

To find out if an email address has ever been subscribed to a Yahoo group you need to

• look in 'management'
• and then under 'group activity'
• enter some or all of the email address/Yahoo ID in 'search logs' on the 'memberships' page.

screen shots for stuff above

Unfortunately, Yahoo groups have been known to continue sending members emails well after they've unsubscribed. As a moderator there is one trick that does tend to sort this out, you can pre-ban a member for a period of about 24 hours and then unban again. This usually stops emails.

If pre-banning doesn't work the member will need to contact Yahoo but as a short term solution here is some instructions on Filtering Emails for some of the more common email clients