At 12:15 PM 6/27/2003 +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote:
Barry Shein <bzs(_at_)world(_dot_)std(_dot_)com> writes:
[..]
> D. "For each email user the MUA or the ISP maintains a whitelist..."
>
> MUAs don't maintain whitelists, people do. And that's the crux of
> the problem as has been shown repeatedly, people generally don't
> know the exact details of where the confirmation of their FTC/AT&T
> no-call list is going to come from to put them on their
> whitelist. Etc.
That's an important problem, and it's one that the IETF (or some other
body, such as W3C) could help to solve.
Something that would be helpful would be (say) and XML specification
for small documents that web sites could offer for email lists that
they run. Such documents would include information about the
originator address of email from the list (or some other kind of
authenticator), and information for subscribing and unsubscribing from
the list, together with information about the list (description,
perhaps an icon that user agents can use).
I've phrased that poorly in the sense that the same idea would work
for short-term communication agreements (such as information about a
particular order from amazon.com, say). Some documents could specify
an expiry time for this use.
Obviously, email clients would parse such documents, and (after
presenting the information and receiving confirmation) would be able
to set up the whitelist (also perhaps arranging a filter to put email
into a special folder), and then tell the originating site about the
desire to accept communications. (I say "email client" on the grounds
that most people use IE/OE, so their email client is also their web
browser. Obviously it would be slightly more complex if the two are
separate, but still readily doable.)
I'm not sure how the information would be passed to ISPs that offer to
do filtering. As you say, there are privacy issues. However, if
these privacy issues can (to a sufficient extent) be addressed, then a
standardised way for the permission information to be passed to ISPs
would be valuable.
Even in the absence of spam, that would be handy, since it would make
it easy to manage mailing lists (my MUA could show me a list, and
could automatically filter them into folders).
[..]
This is going hand in hand with what Bob Wyman mentioned - we need to
define what consent is, how to express it and how to make sure that various
mail system can communicate consent between themselves.
Yakov
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