----- Original Message -----
From: "Alessandro Vesely" <vesely(_at_)tana(_dot_)it>
To: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2014 12:16 PM
On Thu 05/Jun/2014 10:51:05 +0200 T.p. wrote:
I used to get a reminder once a month of the mailing lists to which
I am
subscribed, such as this one, but, around the time of IETF89, this
stopped working. I see that the option on every one of the lists to
which I am subscribed has been reset to not send a reminder, not
something that I would intentionally ever do
I'd be curious to know some more on the usefulness of reminders.
They are useful because e-mail is overridingly spam or something else
evil.
Mailing lists have no reliable way of authenticating the From: address.
Therefore mailing lists implement a system to suspend a subscription
when enough inappropriate mail has come with a given From: address.
This happens to me with IETF WG lists (such as, in the past, v6ops).
At the same time, some lists are so quiet, especially now in the
inter-IETF meeting stadia that it is hard to tell whether or not one is
still subscribed. (and I note a number of 'Test' posts to lists which
suggests others have similar concerns).
The monthly reminder enables me to check that I am still subscribed.
Logical.
Tom Petch
They're what I call a time-distributed database. When subscribers
need to query the status of their subscription, they simply perform a
time seek --by waiting at most one month-- and voilà!
Since we've been discussing how DMARC is going to affect the fate of
mailing lists, recently on this list, I wonder why 21st century
technology doesn't offer anything better. The outcome of that
discussion was that mailbox providers don't know the status of their
clients' subscriptions too, hence they cannot deploy any cooperative
solution such as whitelisting, weak signatures, or 3rd party auths.
Ale
--
"Never expect the people who caused a problem to solve it."
- Albert Einstein