[Asrg] Mailing list signup handshakes

[Steve Atkins]

On Nov 29, 2008, at 3:31 AM, John Levine wrote:

>> I'm asking because I see no means for automated registration of
>> opt-ins. Am I missing something?
>
> Nope.  This is another interesting question that could benefit from
> some research.
>
> If recipient systems had some way to know what bulk mail their users
> had asked for, there would be all sorts of benefits.  They could skip
> the spam filtering for the requested mail, know when to display an
> unsubscribe button vs. a spam button, and probably more that doesn't
> immediately occur to me.
>
> But it's tricky, since there is little standardization among signups
> (particularly when one party is handling signups or sending for
> another) and it's hard to come up with something with usable human
> factors to verify that a putative signup actually happened.  I hope we
> can all agree that the Windows Vista approach of asking "Is this OK?"
> every two minutes isn't it.

The benefits are obvious as they're much the same benefits
large senders and recipients negotiate today.

There's one part that's usually ignored when a group that is as far  
removed
from mainstream reality as this one is starts to discuss the issue - and
that's that mailing list subscriptions are not triggered from within the
MUA by, well, anyone normal. They're triggered from within a web  
browser.
That means that any MUA-centric approach or SMTP protocol level
approach has an awful lot of difficulties to overcome.

Cheers,
   Steve