Michael, let me recap points I made in our offlist discussion involving trying to help the guy who insists unsubscribing 'doesn't work'. In the case of such a user:
1. It's useless merely asking the subscriber 'What steps you're following', because the subscriber doesn't remember.
Comment: If you're serious, stress the need to _reproduce_ the problem and take accurate notes.
2. It's useless merely asking the subscriber 'The error diagnostic(s) (if any) you're getting', because the subscriber doesn't remember.
Comment: As above.
3. It's useless merely asking the subscriber to provide 'FULL EMAIL HEADERS of an example message', because the subscriber has no idea how. (Shouting doesn't clarify.)
Comment: The user may not even know what a 'header' is, at all. If he/she does, the current ones look pretty 'full'; what does 'full' mean? They've probably never seen full headers, and wouldn't know them from an anaconda. If you're serious, best solution would be to provide two image files, showing the same messaage with truncated vs. full headers, and say 'See how the full version has many your mailer normally hides for simplicity? Notice the ones starting with Received? Those and more are needed for diagnosis. Dig in your mailer for a means to reveal them that might be called "Show original" or "Show source", but might be called something else.'
4. It's pointless to admonish the subscriber to never furnish his/her subscription password to the listadmins, as the listadmins have full power to do mischief if they're Bad People, without such passwords. And telling 'I can't unsubscribe' people that is just a pointless distraction from their real problem.
Comment: Seriously, users haplessly mailing their subscriptions around the Internet is very close to harmless to them. Them mailing those to listdmins is _totally_ harmless. Neither risk is worth dwelling on, especially in an instructional mail the user is already going to find both challenging and a little offputting.
On points 1-3, I'm very, very much reminded of hard lessons learned from CABAL's long history running public installfests. When we started doing that in 1998, we brightly and optimistically hoped and expected attendees would download and fill out a simple hardware questionnaire, e.g., how much RAM, what CPU, how big hard drives.
As other 1990s LUGs around the world also found out, this was a total, whopping flop. I think it flopped so hard that we deleted the questionnaire out of sheer disgust, though some other early CABAL materials survive here: http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/cabal/ Note in particular the CABAL FAQ that Don Marti and I co-wrote: Some of that excess optimism about attendees being able to pony up information about their computers survives in parts of the FAQ.
The hard lesson was: They don't know. Which means, if you're serious about getting that information accurately out of them, you need to either teach them or furnish an automated software tool to gather it.
The best answer we got (to the questionnaire) was no answer. But some attendees figured they needed to write down something to make the organisers happy, so they took wild guesses about, say, how much RAM their machines had, and tended to be hilariously wrong. (Needless to say, guesses were worse than lack of answers.)
Why don't they know? Because they never bothered to figure out how to get those answers, and didn't know where to start. Even though, say, the POST RAM count whizzed by their eyes every time they booted (well, until OEMs started hiding the POST process behind pretty pictures), they lacked the curiosity to poke at the machine and investigate to answer obvious questions.
But, the subtler problem: Sometimes they _once_ knew, but forgot what they used to know, and figured a retrospective attempt to guess from dim and fading memory was good enough. _You and I_ know that getting reliable information from a computer means producing it contemporaneously and capturing / writing it down _then_. But amateurs make the error of trying to just remember this stuff -- _all the time_.
I had been co-author of 'How to Ask Questions the Smart Way' for untold years when the insight of people totally failing to capture contemporaneous diagnostic data hit me like a ton of bricks. I had kept on, for years, trying to convey the right message to readers through cute, clever word tricks like this 'Missouri' one in the essay:
Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses [...] Since the preceding point seems to be a tough one for many people to grasp, here's a phrase to remind you: "All diagnosticians are from Missouri." That US state's official motto is "Show me" (earned in 1899, when Congressman Willard D. Vandiver said "I come from a country that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri. You've got to show me.") In diagnosticians' case, it's not a matter of skepticism, but rather a literal, functional need to see whatever is as close as possible to the same raw evidence that you see, rather than your surmises and summaries. Show us.
Describe your problem's symptoms in chronological order [...]
Users, even people familiar with the essay, kept posting their guesses and not raw diagnostic data. Why? I figured it out: Because the raw data scrolled off the screen and into fading memory, and the user wasn't smart enough to go re-acquire it.
If I'd been in the room with that user, I'd have said 'What? Wait, you _didn't_ go back and reproduce the symptom a second time so you can take accurate notes? What sort of crazy approach is that? Why the hell not?' But they don't know -- and, being remote from them across the Internet, we can't see them screwing it up, and are unaware of them flubbing the ground-level basics.
My real epiphany involved the least competent poster to the OCLUG (Orange County LUG) mailing list, a guy who's always posting vague requests for help and supplies about 70% of the mailing list's traffic. At one point, he provided a supposed diagnostic message that was _obviously_ grossly inaccurate for reasons including misspellings, and, suddenly realising the key problem, I asked 'You typed that from memory, didn't you?' He was a little cagey, but the answer was yes. I patiently pointed out that helpers would be attempting to Web-search the diagnostics, so inaccurate transcription was fatal. 'Oh.' And _why_ did he type it from memory? Because it just never occurred to him to reproduce the problem (taking accurate notes, this time) _before_ asking for help.
Remember: They don't 'get' these rock-bottom basics. Just not. If they did, they wouldn't be in endless trouble. And frankly, anyone who cannot figure out how to unsubscribe given help in every posting footer and bountiful help on the Web is self-selected in advance for exactly that kind of haplessness.