Thank you again for all the feedback and the additional people that have reached out to me directly.
The issue we’re trying to address isn’t about tracking users - it’s about our users getting our email at all. More than half of our audience is using a web-based email and 90% are receiving HTML email. When people open an email, click on links, don’t mark us as spam, filter to the trash etc - these actions all contribute to a positive “reputation score” on those mail services and ensure that our messages make it into your inbox, not your junk mail folder. This reputation score is the measurement of our email sending practices and the extent to which we follow the standards established by ISPs. You can learn more about the implementation and politics of this sort of reputation scoring here links [1] [2] [3] Unfortunately text emails don’t have the same feedback loops available as HTML. A lot of people, of course, consider this to be a feature. But an unintended result is the negative effect that zero-interaction signals have on our reputation scoring: we have seen an increase in greylisting/blacklisting as a direct result of our text only emails, and that typically means we can’t send any email to *anyone* until it gets resolved. This is what prompted us to revisit offering text as an option. All that said, giving users the ability to choose and respecting those choices is core to Mozilla’s values, and in retrospect we proposed this change without giving enough consideration to user privacy and agency, which was a mistake. After hearing and discussing everyone’s feedback, we’d like to propose a different approach that will maintain our ability to get relevant messages to interested people and a positive reputation. People who have subscribed to text-only emails will be contacted once a year be with a link to confirm their interest in receiving text emails as well as the option to join other lists, update delivery method etc. We won’t be tracking any usage via text-only mail, just a reconfirmation similar to the double-opt-in process when you first sign-up to receive text email. Most importantly we don’t want to be sending you emails you aren’t interested in. We think this approach will let us work past the reputation-score and junk mail filtering problems we’ve had while respecting the wishes of those users’ who’ve chosen the zero-feedback text-only option. I hope this makes our motivations for the original proposal clear and speaks to the concerns many of your have raised and I’d welcome any additional questions or clarifications on the approach. Best, Michele [1] http://resources.mailgun.com/email-reputation.html [2] https://www.talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/support [3] https://www.senderscore.org/faq/ _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
