On Mar 2, 2010, at 9:12 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Rich Kulawiec wrote quite a lot. I don't propose to
answer it directly - he doesn't introduce any new evidence or new arguments,
just asserts his old arguments more loudly. Everyone reading the exchange is
entitled to evaluate the arguments for themselves in the light of their own
experience.
+1
There is one argument, not made by Kulawiec that does deserve a response.
That is the underlying problem with the TIS button that is real. It will
generate ARFs that are really just list-unsubscribe requests from perfectly
legitimate sources. It will generate these in large numbers and it will be
impractical to reduce them with user education. Anyone proposing to process
the flood of such messages will have to come up with an economical way of
doing so that doesn't inconvenience the list owners.
They'll only be sent if the list owner has signed up for the ISPs feedback
loop. If the list owner believes the FBL reports will inconvenience them, they
need not request them.
As a ludicrous extreme, if the list owners are sending email that is so
offensive that every single recipient hits the "TIS" button then they'll have
to be able to deal with no more inbound email than they're sending outbound
(and that only very briefly).
More realistic numbers are at least two or three orders of magnitude lower than
that. If you're sending a million messages a day, all to ISPs that you have
signed up for feedback loop reports, then you might have to deal with a couple
of thousand feedback loop reports. That's a level of traffic that's trivial to
handle for a company that can manage a database and MTA to send a million
messages in the other direction.
In fact, I think most of the opposition to the TIS button comes from the
owners of such lists who feel they would be the victims. To some extent they
are justified - they are following the rules, why should they pay a penalty.
But if the penalty were a small change in their operation, say an improvement
in the standardization of list-unsubscribe headers - it might be justifiable.
Most of the senders I've talked to think that the reports from the TIS button
at, eg, AOL are _great_. ESPs especially so.
The marketers who object to the TIS button, tend to object to the concept that
their important mail can be described as "spam" by the recipient at all.
Whether that button sends a feedback loop report, adjusts MUA-level filters,
adjusts MTA-level filters or nothing much at all is very much secondary to them.
Since any operator can just ignore the reports, it is unreasonable to claim
that the TIS button will cause extensive damage to anything. They might be
ineffective, but I don't think so.
Cheers,
Steve
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