At 7:01 PM -0500 3/4/03, Alan DeKok wrote:
Email from companies I already deal with is a tiny part of the spam
problem. Even if every company I did business sent me one spam a day,
the result would be less than 100 extra messages. Plus, I know where
they are, and can physically track them down and yell at them.
Never underestimate the end-user's capability to not understand what
they are doing. The things that we call spam, and our capability to
deal with it, are *very* different from the average user.
When we signed my father up for our alpha service, we discovered that
he was reporting 90% of his email as spam. Looking it over it very
quickly became obvious that he hadn't been unchecking all those
little "do you want to receive email from us our our obscure
affiliates" checkboxes when he bought stuff on the web. He didn't
understand them or their consequences. (And in fact, neither would
you or I, without going off and reading the details of their privacy
agreements and discovering that this company has N affiliates who
share it's information.) So why didn't he just unsubscribe? Because
we've all been telling people for years not to use the unsubscribe
links in spam. And he couldn't tell which were legit and which were
not.
A verified sender model would allow us to automatically fix this
problem, by reliably allowing him to unsubscribe. Spam services or
MUAs could use that information and present the option to the user.
With legal backing, companies that ignored the request could be
reported for abuse.
Of course, confirmed opt-in would prevent the problem from occurring at all.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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