Subject: Re: [Asrg] Proposal for Opt-Out

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 20:32:47 -0800 (PST)

On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Kee Hinckley wrote:

> At 6:11 PM -0800 3/27/03, [email-masked] wrote:
> >Opt-out will not be effective all by itself.
> 
> Of the proposals we have seen so far, which would change the dynamics 
> of opt-out as I've described them?
The proposals offered so far are incomplete, that is why we all can not 
decide on any one... But I'll tell general solution:

1. We stop forgeries of mail headers and force all senders to reveal 
their name (but that I mean source, not actual name for personal emails, 
etc).

2. We provide means for mail servers to authenticate in such a way that 
spammer can not easily change just their domain or their ip and begin 
sending email again (they'd soon be detected and their mail server 
blacklisted). 

3. Law outlaws sending unsolicited commercial email

4. ISPs use filtering to get rid of unwanted spam that may still path 
through the cracks (i.e. spammer got new mail server and it has not been 
blacklisted yet or they hijacked the server, etc. etc.)

This leaves commercial opt-in email lists where company is setup as real 
business that does not hide itself and they get permission to send user an 
information on their product (airline ticket offers) but you do not want 
to receive "extra" advertisements of credit card offers as you're not 
interested in that. This is where opt-out system comes in and helps, 
it regulates commercial email and forces them to respect your wishes.
Now the system I described allows for automated white-listing of certain 
commercial emails where users want to receive them - that will help on 
filters and allow them to be more effective and have less false-positives.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Communications Inc. 
[email-masked]

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From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 10:24:07 -0500

>decide on any one... But I'll tell general solution:

That's a very long wishlist.  You've postulated a world where the 
only people who send you non-opt-in email are either people who 
bought your address from people who forced you to agree to let them 
sell it, or people who can't seem to distinguish between the 
different types of email they want to send you.  You then see opt-out 
as the way to stop that.

I don't see that that changes anything.  Legitimize opt-out and all 
companies will buy and sell email addresses.  After all, you can 
always opt-out.

And the technical issues (aging, timeout, validation, opting out 
invalid email addresses...).  Those still remain as well.

Frankly, opt-out scares the hell out of me.

But do go ahead and spell out the best possible system.  If we 
understand the problem technically then that gives us the ability to 
shoot down bad proposals even before we get to the social argument. 
Let's just try and keep those unintended consequences in mind.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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From: Chuq Von Rospach <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 09:14:13 -0800

> Frankly, opt-out scares the hell out of me.

and any opt-out system is either going to have to have the buy-in of 
the e-marketers voluntarily, or be stuffed down their throat through 
legislation. And you can bet if they aren't interested in voluntarily 
buying into it, it won't go easy being legislated.

So any opt-out system has to also deal with the needs and interests of 
the e-marketers. If it's designed and built unilaterally, it'll be a 
non-starter, and while this is a technical forum, it shouldn't be 
coming up with things that are politically infeasible, since that's a 
waste of time.

So if there's going to discussions of building systems that other 
groups have to agree to use, those groups need to be involved at some 
level, too. Maybe not now, but liason to them one decisions are made to 
go in that direction.

(I'll say again, however, that you can fix every legitimate e-marketer 
in existance perfectly, exactly the way you want it in your dreams, and 
most users won't ever notice because of all of the spam in their 
mailboxes. I think opt-out systems are worthy of exploring, NEXT. Until 
the issue of spam and spam volumes are dealt with, nothing else matters 
here. Opt-out systems are polishing the brass on the Titanic. Deal with 
the iceberg first!)

I think the problem is we keep migrating back into "fixing the 
e-marketing space" because we at least can find and talk to those 
folks, where spam is a much nastier, intractable problem. the problem, 
though, is that it ends up solving problems that don't solve the 
problem, which is that 42% of the mail that I wake up to every morning 
is spam, and I have a high-volume inbox. And I compare that with the 
10-15 pieces of email a week I get from e-marketers (amazon, orbitz, 
etc), and frankly, that's just not The Problem here. It's sara and her 
pet zebra. Twelve times.

Working with the e-marketing people is a good thing. Coming up with 
standards for consent systems (whether they're opt-in, opt-out or 
whatever, it boils down to a consent system) is a good thing. 
Standardizing EULAs and how they're presented is a very good thing. 
Anything we can do to help users get a more standard environment that 
works reliably in that space is a very good thing -- but it won't solve 
the problem, and even if all of that got implemented perfectly, this 
forum would be an abject failure if sara's e-mail keeps showing up in 
my mailbox every day.

Yes, it's the tougher problem, but if it's not solved, nothing else 
matters.

IMHO, of course.