On Nov 29, 2008, at 3:31 AM, John Levine wrote:
I'm asking because I see no means for automated registration of
opt-ins. Am I missing something?
Nope. This is another interesting question that could benefit from
some research.
If recipient systems had some way to know what bulk mail their users
had asked for, there would be all sorts of benefits. They could skip
the spam filtering for the requested mail, know when to display an
unsubscribe button vs. a spam button, and probably more that doesn't
immediately occur to me.
But it's tricky, since there is little standardization among signups
(particularly when one party is handling signups or sending for
another) and it's hard to come up with something with usable human
factors to verify that a putative signup actually happened. I hope we
can all agree that the Windows Vista approach of asking "Is this OK?"
every two minutes isn't it.
The benefits are obvious as they're much the same benefits
large senders and recipients negotiate today.
There's one part that's usually ignored when a group that is as far
removed
from mainstream reality as this one is starts to discuss the issue - and
that's that mailing list subscriptions are not triggered from within the
MUA by, well, anyone normal. They're triggered from within a web
browser.
That means that any MUA-centric approach or SMTP protocol level
approach has an awful lot of difficulties to overcome.
Cheers,
Steve
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