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Re: [Asrg] Opt-Out Notes: too complicated, ignoring history

2003-03-28 11:30:53
People can ask for any e-mail they want.  That's a real and useful choice.

Indeed, but not one in this protocol proposed.

I don't get it.  People can already ask for all the bulk mail they want,
by signing up for newsletters and discussion groups.  That part of the
e-mail infrastructure works fine, with or without adding NO UBE.  Why is
it important or even useful to reinvent that?

But in the end, I see this banner as effectively equivalent to writing
into SMTP, "Senders MUST NOT send UBE"

Don't be silly.  If you want to run a system that accepts all spam, or
uses some other scheme to decide what mail it'll accept, you can keep
doing so, and senders can keep sending it to you.  Nothing here changes
the status quo for people who don't want to change their mail servers.

The goal here is not to give users a choice, the reality is it is to
have everybody specify the same choice, for who wouldn't want to say they
don't want spam?

Saying this over and over again doesn't make it any more true and only
distracts from your valid arguments.  Nothing coerces server managers to
use NO UBE (other than, perhaps, a desire for self-preservation which
neither of us is likely to change).  If a server manager doesn't want to
use NO UBE, nobody other than his users will care in the least.

The engineering question here is, "Do users need a way to refect their
UBE preferences during the SMTP dialog, and if so, how should they be able
to do it in a way that meets their desires."

No, the question is whether server managers need a standardized way to
publish the policy they already have.  If you want to invent a system full
of knobs and dials with a langugage that allows users to state in
excruciating detail what kind of mail they want and under what conditions,
you can certainly do so, but that's not what this is.

On the nearly-technical side, I am also concerned about how much success there
will be in defining the terms.  Some what Solicited ...

This argument has been thrashed out in telemarketing and junk fax laws and
court cases.  It's not a technical question, so we don't need to redo that
here.

Back to the technical, I would still recommend that any protocol defined
in this matter allow individual choice.

Users can already ask for all the mail they want, so the principle of
parsimony tells us that it's unwise to invent a new mechanism that
duplicates (badly) what they already have.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet 
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.



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