[OpenID] Cancel account

[Don McMorris]

For anybody who wishes to cancel your account:

It is common netiquette to go through the proper procedure for
canceling your subscription to a mailing list.  Here's how you should
go about being removed from this, or any, mailing list:

1) Check your messages that you receive as a result of being a member
of the list.  Many lists (this one included) will contain a URL in the
message footers, or even full unsubscribe instructions.

2) Check your welcome message (you know, the one that said "Keep
this"?).  It will usually say how to unsubscribe if you wish to

3) Follow the procedures you used to subscribe.  If you sent an e-mail
to a certain address with something along the lines of "subscribe
bob at foobar.info", then send another e-mail to the same address with
"unsubscribe bob at foobar.info".  If you went to a URL, go to the same
URL and find a link.

4) Use a search engine to find information on the list.  Chances are,
you will find (un)subscribe instructions in the top few results.

5) Contact the list owner or moderator, and kindly ask for assistance.
 It is fairly standard practice for a list administrator to have an
e-mail alias set up with a username suffix of "-owner", such as
"listname-owner at foobar.info" (or, in this case,
general-owner at openid.net).

6) Only as an ABSOLUTE LAST RESORT, after other attempts of finding
out how to ubsubscribe have failed, can you e-mail the list and ask
how you can unsubscribe yourself.  Remember, messages to any mailing
list should be only of content that would likely be of general
interest to the majority of the subscribers.  Chances are, the
hundreds or even thousands of list subscribers aren't interested in
the fact you want to leave, nor do they have the capability to remove
you.
Also, remember that archives to the list are generally available
publicly and permanently (even if it's removed from the sponsors'
archives, there are probably many other privately-maintained archives
that people make publicly available).  A future employer or such may
decide they want to search for you online, and when they come across
the archives they may decide that you do not attempt to solve problems
yourself before bothering everybody else.  As such, even this
seemingly innocent posting can come back to "bite you in the arse" on
a later date, just because you didn't do a few minutes of research.

In the case of the general at openid.net mailing list, the footer of
every message contains a URL,
http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/general.  By going here, there is a
way to unsubscribe yourself (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Hope this helps.  Remember, out of the hundreds or even thousands of
subscribers to this or any other e-mail list, probably less than 5
have the ABILITY to remove you.  5 out of hundreds or thousands
doesn't constitute a general interest, and as such it is inappropriate
to request unsubscribe by mailing the list.

Hope this helps clarify things.

--Don