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Unsubscribing from McAfee/Network Associates AVERT

McAfee offers quite a useful virus alert service by email – more details here – but unfortunately their mailing list is rather difficult to unsubscribe from. There are no instructions in the body of their emails at all; the headers do contain this promising looking entry:

List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:leave-512213-327810Xlistserv.mcafee.com>@

Frustratingly, however, although listserv.mcafee.com actually resolves and accepts SMTP connections, it rejects all delivery attempts for that domain:

RCPT TO:<leave-512213-327810Xlistserv.mcafee.com>@

550 Relaying denied.

The solution, it turns out, is to change the domain to listserv.nai.com – presumably the domain they were using when they first configured the mailing list software, and the only address it will actually accept. That domain resolves to the same server, 205.227.136.228, but this corrected address will actually be accepted. (McAfee was founded in 1987, then merged with Network General in 1997 to become Network Associates, reverting to the name McAfee in 2004.)

(The numbers are presumably subscriber-specific, so using this exact address will attempt to unsubscribe an old address of mine which has already been unsubscribed. Obviously, you will need to change these numbers to match those in your own email headers!)

Quite why a major company like McAfee is operating a mailing list with no functioning unsubscribe instructions, I don’t know, but hopefully anyone searching for help will now be able to find it, rather than having to guess the correct address!