Charles Gregory wrote:
On Fri, 4 Dec 2009, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
What are you asking? Obviously 'unsolicited' is NOT 'wanted', so
therefore
by using the word 'wanted' I am by definition meaning *solicited*. That
means somone ASKED for the mail. REQUESTED it via an
opt-in mechanism, with confirmation.
I will then have to REPEAT that this will NEVER fly.
If you mean the marketers will fight to get around it, well, of course,
that is their goal in life: Trying to look legitimate while skirting the
thin edge of spamming....
If you look at return path they are ....
whitelisting "permission-based" e-mail.
...(snipped good 'redbox' example)
Yes, this is the grand new frontier of e-mail marketing. Technically,
you *are* opting-in. It meets satisfactory criteria because you are
using some other form of identification to substantiate that you are
*really* you (you are buying stuff). But it puts the burden back on the
customer to remember to later 'opt out' after the genuine purpose for
having that e-mail has been completed. Very sneaky.
So, technically if I hire someone to kill you, I'm technically not
guilty of murder since I didn't pull the trigger? Technically speaking.
But now, because 'technically' you have people 'opting-in' you once
again face the problem that *some* people actually *want* the after-sale
advertising e-mails, and some don't and consider it spam. What default
score do you set in a situation like that? How much strength does a
whitelist get?
Well, since it's a MINORITY of my users that WANT the spam it seems to
me that the burden of whitelisting should be put on them. That seems to
be the fair thing.
Because the fact is if I use Habeas then the majority who DON'T want the
marketing stuff, (or don't care either ay) even though they technically"
signed up for it, now have the burden of unsubscribing or blacklisting.
No, the recipients HAVE NOT explicitly requested an opt-in, they have
merely NOT explicitly requested to opt-out when they provided their
e-mail address for some other reason.
Now I don't *know* Habeas policy, but I would suspect that they would
require any company of this type to have a click-box that, if left
unchecked, results in no further mail than that necessary to complete
the transaction. If they don't then the value of the whitelist is
degraded, and so it should not be favored by mail filters like SA.
BUT WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS. The examples cited in recent posts
have been genuine unsolicited mails. Mail to honeypot addresses, etc.
There is an abuse issue, and it is not related to the otherwise
worthwhile point made above.
And yes, people *do* request notices of weekly specials at their
computer
store, and ads for the next event at the colliseum. There is a lot of
legitimate e-mail advertising. None of it is (should be) 'unsolicited'.
Wrong.
People fall into a bell-curve on this issue.
Thank you for clarifying that yes, my point is that SOME people (not
'all') sign up for these e-mails. Doesn't make me 'wrong'. Just means
you read into my words an 'all' that I did not explicitly use.
That's why Habeas customers need a whitelist in the first place -
because they are adopting a point of view of what spam is that is
contrary to what most users hold.
This is self-defeating hyperbole. My first instinct is to argue with
this brash mis-statement of their
Who is "their"
intent and practices. So please avoid
this
kind of hyped garbage and stick to the simple facts you presented in the
rest of your post which say it like it really is.
Habeas *says* they review each client carefully. So the question is
whether they are doing a good enough job. People who wish to entertain
accusations that they are deliberately doing a poor one for profit *may*
have a point, but I consider it unlikely, as Habeas has a strong
profit-driven motive to NOT be viewed as unreliable in the community.
The real truth of it is Habeas is operating in that grey area of trying
to please 2 opposing camps. On the one side they have the e-mail admins
that aren't going to use them unless they can convince those admins to
sign on, and unless they can, they won't have anything to sell the
mass-marketers. On the other side they have the mass-marketers who have
an incentive to use guile, and "sneakiness"
as you said, to create large mailing lists of users who may or many not
want to be on those lists, and a huge incentive to push Habeas to ignore
complaints about their mailings.
My problem with Habeas, and the reason that I'll never use them on any
mailserver I administer, is that they aren't trying to work with both
those camps to bring them together. If they were, then a Habeas
representative would be responding to the Habeas detractors posting on
the SA mailing list, not you.
Instead, Habeas is trying to strong-arm both those groups. To the
mass-mailers they are saying "all the mailserver admins out there are
using us, so unless you use us, everyone will delete your mass-mail"
To the admins, they are saying that "all the legitimate mass-mailers are
using us, so your users are going to complain about FP's unless you use
us". To people like me and Richard, who bring up perfectly legitimate
examples like the redbox example, and who understand what they are all
about, they IGNORE us, because they figure that there's plenty of
stupider mailserver admins out there that are easier to cow, and once
they get the rest of them cowed into using their stuff, then people like
me won't have any choice but to use them.
If we stop with the crazy 'who is in whose pocket' kind of junk, and dig
into what is really happening, this company may take us seriously and
consider it in its own best interests to investigate the way spam (true
unsolicited, NEVER approved) *is* being accredited by their whitelists
and delivered to addresses that can be demonstrated to be 100% certain
to have never requested it.
They have had the option to do this already for years, now, and have
elected to use implied threats to the world's ISP's, rather than
regularly participating on this list.
I'll tell you what would make me change my mind and use Habeas. It
would be if a Habeas employee regularly monitored this list, and posted
corrections to some of the more outrageous mis-statements as to how they
operate. It would be if Habeas contributed code and rulesets to the SA
project itself. That is what Cisco corporation does with the cisco-nsp
mailing list. Cisco PARTICIPATES, albet in a non-official manner, they
have one employee who tries to help answer questions and identifies
himself as a Cisco employee, and Cisco has released thousands of lines
of open source code to the community, and many good utilities. For
example I've used the Cisco TFTP server under Windows many times to TFTP
update devices that aren't even Cisco devices.
Charles, perhaps in real life you ARE a Habeas employee, which is why
you are so pro-Habeas. But, the fact is that Habeas doesn't have any
credibility in my book as long as their employees only go where they
have cheering choirs.
I respect a company that is out there doing something that I disagree
with, and is willing to come and debate with me why they have chosen to
do it, and who has solid legitimate reasons for doing what they are
doing. For example, PGE runs the Boardman coal plant that has the
highest mercury emissions in the country. I don't like it, since I
think that coal is not a long term solution to electrical generation.
But, I respect PGE because even though I'd like to see them shut
Boardman down, PGE is also going great guns to get adequate wind
capacity generation online, has some more hundreds of millions of
dollars budgeted for even more pollution controls on Boardman in the
future, and if they shut Boardman down right now and bought power
elsewhere, it would just be generated by coal elsewhere so there would
be no net decrease in coal electrical generation. These are solid
reasons and PGE has and continues to make attempts to reach out to the
various environmental camps that oppose Boardman.
Habeas, by contrast, isn't helping me when they are working to
essentially help legitimize spamming, and they are too much a coward
(apparently) to come here and justify why they are doing it. You don't
seem to understand that it's not our business to come crawling to
Habeas, begging them to take us seriously. We have a public forum, they
can participate if they want. They have chosen not to, and instead
chosen to try to force mailserver admins to use them on their terms.
Well, you can do what you want, but I am one mailserver admin who has
chosen to NOT use them.
Ted
