Re: [ietf-smtp] Possible cont4ibution to moving forward with RFC5321bis SMTP

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 12/30/19 8:31 AM, Laura Atkins wrote:

> 30% of email addresses on a marketing list go bad every year. It 
> doesn’t seem that changing email addresses is that problematic.

Of course it is problematic, because any email address that is changed 
for that reason cannot be used as stable contact info for use between 
friends and colleagues.    And this degrades the utility of email.

Of those 30%, I wonder how many of those addresses were addresses that 
people intended to use as stable addresses in the first place.   I 
wonder how many people obtain "throwaway" addresses specifically for the 
purpose of disclosing in contexts where they seem likely to be exploited 
by marketers, while reserving other addresses for use for mail that they 
want to get.

I also wonder how many people routinely get a "throwaway" email address 
on any rare occasion that they need to correspond with anyone over 
email, with the expectation that such correspondence will inherently be 
short term, because many people seem to treat email as a communications 
medium of last resort.

So I wouldn't assume that those 30% were addresses that people wanted to 
keep anyway.

But yes, I'm aware that one of the ways that people deal with spam is by 
changing email addresses.     If spam as experienced by ordinary people 
were not so bad, causing them to change email addresses as a way of 
dealing with it, email would be more useful.

Keith