How to subscribe to a Slackware Linux mailing list

A while back I lost access to the email address with which I had subscribed to the slackware-security mailing list. This does not please Bob, so today I logged into my webmail account and sent along a new request to join slackware-security and slackware-announce. The response I got in return gave me a good laugh and a swift feel of nostalgia.

>>>> Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
**** Command 'content-type:' not recognized.
>>>> Content-Length: 46
**** Command 'content-length:' not recognized.
>>>> 
>>>> <html>subscribe slackware-security</html>
**** Command '<html>subscribe slackware-security</html>' not recognized.
>>>> 
**** No valid commands found.
**** Commands must be in message BODY, not in HEADER.

Pretty amusing or what /O\
Notice how it’s trying to interpret and execute each line as a separate command. The list owner is using the Majordomo mailing list manager and it doesn’t understand HTML encoding. Unfortunately for me, my webmail app only offers the text/html MIME type so that’s not going to work out.

Thankfully, I have my trusted Thunderbird email client available as I’ll never rely too heavily on cloud-based services. Let me change the MIME type to text/plain and give this another go:

Slackware Linux mailing list subscription

Turn off your signature and send the message as plain text and it’ll work just fine.

Content-Type: text/plain
To: majordomo@slackware.com
Subject: Not required
Body: 
subscribe slackware-announce
subscribe slackware-security

Majordomo supports multiple subscribe commands so you can join both slackware-announce and slackware-security in one go.

Anyhow, I can’t really complain about this as I personally despise getting HTML encoded mail. And Majordomo is really old, you can’t expect it to understand what the cool kids are saying these days ;-)

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