I really like your analogy to postal mail:
1. personal email
2. non-specific junk email
3. specific junk email
I had not considered that model before and it very much applies. Seems
to me if one accepts that model it pretty much shuts down my issue. As
with postal mail, a "subscriber" is left with the responsibility of
sorting/filtering their email as best they can with whatever information
the originator happens to make available to them. I guess I just feel a
little bit of disappointment because we could do better with technology
if we would all cooperate to do so.
Separately, I do want to comment on a couple other things you said.
In my opinion, VERPs belong at the envelope layer, not in the message
(i.e., individual addressing), because I try very hard to enforce the
postal analogy to an extreme: you don't steam open the envelope and mess
with what's inside. Of course that makes VERPs less than 100%
effective, since not all email systems respect the separation. And,
just to contradict myself, I do like what Lyris does with Message-IDs,
but I give myself this because Message-ID really belongs to the email
system, not the message, and is just unfortunately carried in the
"message".
For the record, I strongly support the use of the List-* headers.
Although a lot of elists use them, the real issue is getting the email
clients to do something useful with them.
Also, I, too, am philosophically opposed to adding footers or headers to
messages, although as a practical matter they are hard to avoid. On the
technical side, if you have an elist that allows other than text/plain
content, adding headers and footers fails miserably unless you take care
to construct or reconstruct a multipart.
Anyway, marketing is one thing and technical issues are another.
Although I understand why what's happening is happening, on balance I
don't find the technical reasons compelling. Nonetheless, your analogy
has "bumped my balance" just a bit.
Jim
--
James M. Galvin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public mailing lists hosted free at <http://www.elistx.com>
