Re: Water tight opt-in (yet another FUSSP)

On Sun 22/Dec/2013 18:27:53 +0100 Seth wrote:
> Alessandro Vesely <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> It seems to me it would only take some commitment and cooperation to
>> have it started.  I'm unable to find the proper anchor for this FUSSP
>> in Vernon's page[1], not even the first (I didn't "discover", just
>> stumbled upon it.)  Can you help?
> 
> Probably my idea from over a decade ago (I have no idea how long):
> confirmation requests would be sent to the user's ISP, who would
> generate the confirmation web link and send it to the user.  The
> confirmation would go through the ISP, so the ISP would *know* that this
> user subscribed to this list.

Yeah, there are lots of similar variations.  The advantage of this
arrangement is that the ISP (well, the mailbox provider) can confirm
the user really wants to subscribe at a moment when he or she knows
what subscription they're talking about.

> The purpose wasn't "proof", but rather to allow users to subscribe to
> lists that other users (at the same ISP) called spam, without the ISP
> filtering mail to the users who legitimately subscribed.

It is somewhat hazy how to identify a mail stream.  DKIM's d= tag plus
a signed List-Id would be a candidate.  That's needed because tagged
addresses can leak and be abused too.

> Likewise, "this is spam" reports from users known to have
> subscribed would be met with "you subscribed to <list> on <date>;
> do you want to unsubscribe?" rather than outward reports of spam.

And cooperation would also allow varying degrees of unsubscription,
for example one might still accept really astounding announcements on
the subject.  IMHO, such feature should be regarded as a very valuable
asset by marketers, as it provides a means to legitimately contact a
potentially huge number of people, in some occasions.  Spam reports
can help modulate the frequency of messages so as to suit each user's
concept of "really astounding".

As a last resort, users can unilaterally withdraw misbehaving tagged
addresses.  That is their guarantee.

The first thing to do is probably to convince more users to use tagged
addresses whenever they won't be published.  TrashMail's two-click
paste is very attractive in that respect, but it needs an add-on.
OTOH, if web forms provided that functionality, it would be easier for
mailbox providers to be second movers.  A chicken and egg question.

> Providing the recipient ISP is trustworthy, this would also provide
> proof of opt-in for a third party.

You mean the third party would have to ask the ISP?  A marketer could
hand digitally signed statements to an ESP, which, in turn would just
need to run a script in order to extract a clean list automatically.

> It isn't close to FUSSP, since it addresses only list mail.  While I'm
> subscribed to hundreds of lists using tagged addresses, much of my spam
> still comes to my untagged people-and-discussion-lists address.

Hm, yes, you're right, even for an overloaded acceptation of the term
"list" that encompasses all legitimate bulk mail.  However, if
receivers can tell what mail is solicited, detecting spam reduces to
recognizing what mail is bulk.  50% of the work done, I'd say :-)

Ale
-- 
http://fixforwarding.org/wiki/Water_tight_opt-in

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