Subject: [Asrg] Opt out vs opt in

From: "M Wild" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 14:37:25 -0500

I have been reading the threads on the various opt out proposals.  I have a
philosophical problem with opt out, to wit, "Why should I have to opt out of
something I never asked for in the first place?"  We recommend to our
customers to *NEVER* respond to a spam email with the exception of requests
to "legitimate senders"  The decision on what constitutes a legitimate
sender is left as an exercise to the customer however the example I give is
a company known to you, the mail comes from @example.com and the unsubscribe
address is also from @example.com and/or is in the form
http://www.example.com/unsubscribe.cgi  I also specifically warn against
unsubscribes to email addresses at any one of the free email providers (ex.
[email-masked])  or http://999.999.999.999/unsubscribe.cgi  My
attention is my property.  I know what I want to look at and if I'm
interested enough I'll actually search it out (I spent about an hour
attempting to determine how to subscribe to this list...it is not obvious
from the IETF website...or maybe I was having a clueless moment :-/ )  My
take is the *ONLY* way a sender should be sending me bulk mail is if I
verifiably *ASK* for it...ex. a double opt-in consisting of the request and
then a verification reply from me that says "Yes I really asked for this"
This does not preclude an individual sender from emailing me out of the blue
in response to something they saw that I said.  I've invited feedback from
the list on a number of issues...that mail, to me *IS* solicited even if I
didn't really know who I was soliciting mail from.  My judgment is that most
folks preference would be don't talk to me unless I ask for it.  Opt out
violates that principle.  Verifiable opt in is needed to address the sites
that this email is sent to you because you visited our site or one of our
affiliates and requested communications of this type addressed to nobody,
daemon or MAILER-DAEMON at my domain.  My favorite is spam responses to a
personal ad to mailer-daemon...makes me wonder what my mail servers are up
to on those lonely nights that I'm wasting a couple hours sleeping.  A
single or limited number of opt out sites may alleviate this problem but I
simply don't have time to opt out from spammera.com and then start receiving
mail from spammerb.com...same company.  The marketer may say "Well
spammera.com *HAS* stopped sending you mail"  How does that solve the
problem from the ten gazillion others?  I think this is opt out's fatal
flaw.

Regards
Mike

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