Many at their wits' end as unsubscribing fails to stop flood of RTI group mails
| By: Adnan Attarwala | Date: 2012-03-13 | Place: Pune Group moderators say another website to blame Thousands of people across several states have been waking up each morning to discover their email inboxes flooded with hundreds of unwanted emails. The emails have been coming through a googlegroups forum called humjanenge@googlegroups.com, a group for netizens exchanging ideas and messages on the Right to Information Act 2005. Ajay Jangrid, who works for an insurance firm, finds hundreds of unwanted mails in his inbox every day. "I've been receiving 100-200 mails every day despite sending several notices to the group," he said. "I've tried unsubscribing several times, but to no avail." Though only those who register with the site can view replies posted by RTI activists, since the past few weeks thousands of people across the state, Gujarat and Karnataka who are not involved with any RTI queries have been receiving a barrage of messages from the group. Citizens say that the mails do not have the usual footer that allows recipients to unsubscribe and most of them have never subscribed to this group. "I wrote to someone called Sarbajit Roy, who claimed to be moderator of the group, requesting them to unsubscribe me," said Kamal Patel, a citizen who has been getting these mails. "The site has been infected by some virus. I had subscribed to it earlier just to derive information on issues on which RTI had been filed. But all of a sudden there has been spurt of mails, which is becoming a nuisance. There are issues that I am not even interested in reading," said social activist Jitendra Gupta. Nayana Kathpalia, co-convenor of the NGO Citispace, who has also been receiving mails said, "Despite unsubscribing I've been receiving unwanted mails. Somebody should complain about this." According to the administrators of the group, those wishing not to receive these mails can immediately unsubscribe and the moderators regularly post messages advising members how to unsubscribe. "If someone is not a member of humjanenge@googlegroups.com then they are not receiving mails from our group, but they could be receiving forwarded emails from the (RTI) network through other members," Sarbajit Roy stated in an email. The moderators claim that the mails are being forwarded through another site called riseup.net. "Nobody knew the procedure to unsubscribe there, and our mailing list was being blamed for that," Roy said. |
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