At 4:42 PM -0800 3/8/03, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
Lets face it the management of mailing lists is a mess. A member of the IESG
This depends on the software. Mailing list software integrated with
the MTA can work quite well (CommuniGate is an excellent example,
although weak for moderated lists.) But I'll agree, it's certainly
very easy to run a badly managed mailing list, and the "standards"
are all over the map.
I think that we need to address mailing lists as a special case for action.
In particular it should be possible to communicate to MTAs in the
communication path the fact that a user has opted in to the list.
One reason for this is that if my mailer could detect mail from mailing
lists reliably I could then ditch the 50% of the spam I get that is not
addressed to me at all. [Yes I know that they would adapt, but their current
behaviour has a purpose and I want to block that purpose].
Requiring mailing lists to include verification of consent is an
intriguing idea. Although it suffers from the same problem as
sending encrypted email--you either need to send an individual copy
to every person, or include multiple consent verifications with each
message (which, if you have good list software, is batched up on a
per-domain basis into groups of 50 to 200 people per message).
However I'm not sure how this lets you ditch "bcc"d spam. Bcc'ing
recipients is becoming more and more common as people become more
aware that cc'ing their friends and relatives with the latest joke is
a great way to spread people's addresses to spammers and viruses.
If we are going to get the mail infrastructure sorted out for the sake of
stopping spam we might as well sort out a bunch of the other pathologies it
currently suffers from if the cost is low. I believe that the way we will
If the cost is low. We don't want to pull a Mozilla here and spend
three years developing a nifty new cross-platform toolkit and bug
reporting tool when what people wanted was a browser.
1 Reply to sends the reply to the original author, not
the mailing list. Reply to all sends the reply to the
mailing list and to all prior authors, creating a shadow
mailing list
Given that most email clients have only two types of reply, neither
of which map directly to the list model, it's not clear there's a
right way to fix this, it would require an MUA option as well, but
there could be a consistent list header to help it. (Eudora has an
option to make reply go to sender, reply-all go to list, but it
doesn't work on all lists, including this one.)
2 Out of office responses getting sent to list members
That is 100% an MTA problem, and the finger for 99% of those points
directly to Microsoft. Delivery problems are supposed to go the
envelope from. Out of office messages are delivery problems. End of
story.
3 I have to tell the mail client to create a folder for each list
What would you have the list do for this? (Speaking as someone who
filters some lists into shared folders, some into single folders, and
splits some based on content into sub folders.)
The rest of the issues are pretty much addressed directly by the
charter of this list. (Well, not 4c.)
To subscribe to a list Alice goes to the 'subscribe to list'
option in the tools menu of her client. This generates a
And then we are back to the deployment problem.
But backing up. If you want to block mailing lists that send to you
without authorization, then you first need to be able to identify
mailing lists. So we need an authentication system for them. And
then you need a way to tell bulk mail from spam so you know that
something is a mailing list when it's pretending not to be.
The one bright side on all of this, and the thing I really think we
need to leverage, is that legitimate bulk mailers are currently in a
position where they would be very receptive to spending money and
time installing an authentication system.
--
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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