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mailing lists (was - simplicity, focus and adoption; what problem are we trying to solve?)

2004-10-28 19:05:41


On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

Without wanting to dispute the other point david makes I do want to disagree
with a point made at the meeting.

A mailing list is not the same as a person resending mail. On a mailing list
we now have an assumption that the user consented to receive the message
from that source.

Technically speaking this consent (being subscription) is primarily only
held by mail list manager. The users sometimes do whitelist mail lists
(i.e. they keep track of that consent) but for most part they dont and
that means this "consent" is technically unconfirmed and can easily be 
forged by having a spammer pretend to be a mail list.

So going back to your original thought, how does knowning that prior
consent exist help us in desiging automated email signatures system?

---
William Leibzon, Elan Networks:
 mailto: william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net
Anti-Spam and Email Security Research Worksite:
 http://www.elan.net/~william/emailsecurity/


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