From: Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu
...
And you want them to cut-and-paste the list address into a form AND get
all the right options set too? I think you're giving the users too much
credit for possessing operational neurons....
For the purposes of fighting spam, users who cannot reply to email
matter less than those who can. If there were no users that would
reply to email, then the only contact information in spam would
be telephone numbers and postal addresses. That a lot of spam
includes email addresses and various URLs shows that the situation
with legitimate subscription confirmations is not at all bad.
The most you might conclude is that more mailing list and auto-whitelisting
software should adopt mechanisms common in spam, such as mailto URLs
that encode the confirming token in the subject or the destination
address. Most of the users who can't figure out how to cut and paste
or reply to mail are also dumb enough to us "web enabled" MUAs.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com