Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@jeff303
Last active August 27, 2020 16:23
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save jeff303/ba1906bb7bcb2f2501528a8bb1521b8e to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save jeff303/ba1906bb7bcb2f2501528a8bb1521b8e to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
How to unsubscribe from Apache Spark mailing lists

The Problem

It looks like you're trying to unsubscribe from an Apache Spark mailing list. Unfortunately, you have used the main mailing list address for your request (i.e. the one that is supposed to be for actual content and discussion, as opposed to administrative requests). This is bad for a few reasons.

  1. It clutters up the archive, as these messages stick around forever.
  2. It generates an unnecessary email to many thousands of people
  3. It doesn't actually do what you want, which is unsubscribing from the mailing list.

The Solution

The good news is there are a few places where the instructions for unsubscribing are documented. You have probably come across them before, but just in case you need a refresher:

  1. The Spark community site. Ctrl+F for the word unsubscribe
  2. The welcome email you received when signing up for the mailing list. Ctrl+F for the word unsubscribe
  3. The message header of every message distributed to the list. View headers to see it (instructions for Gmail here). List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:user-unsubscribe@spark.apache.org>

Footnotes

This is actually a "solved" problem. Some mailing list software already handles this issue transparently. mailman, for example, already handles this problem by detecting when somebody sends an "unsubscribe" message to the main list, and automatically diverts it or issues an auto-response. However, the Apache infra team (which maintains the mailing lists for Apache projects) has decided they can't or won't do anything along these lines.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment