On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 06:19:35PM -0400, Dave Karpf wrote: > One distinction that I think is worth pondering though: it seems like the > standard of "serious about email" is in conflict with the goal of > "frequently communicating with 20M supporters."
That's a good point. Two responses: 1. At this moment, I see no evidence on the table that Avaaz has 20M subscribers. Right now they have zero, because a subscriber whose verified provenance can't be produced on demand isn't a subscriber at all. (I'm not picking on Avaaz here. Everyone who runs a mailing list should be able to do that. I'm certain that the operators of *this list* could, because they're using Mailman and they're using it properly.) 2. If Avaaz wishes to frequently communicate (via email) with such a large number of people, then it should make a strong and sustained effort to comply with standards (in the formal sense, as articulated by RFCs) and best practices (in the informal sense, the things that all well-run mailing lists have done for decades.) People who do these things rarely have serious and/or persistent issues; people who ignore them or try to cut corners or dodge them invariably cause their own problems. (For example, see MoveOn, which long ago got itself hardwired into a kazillion blacklists -- including those run by people politically sympathetic to their cause -- because they insisted on spamming.) ---rsk -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
