Re: Last Call: <draft-levine-herkula-oneclick-04.txt> (Signalling one-click functionality for list email headers) to Proposed Standard

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

>Ah.   That may suggest the disconnect we are having lies
>somewhere other than in what I assumed.   This document appears
>to have been written for Standards Track and the Last Call is
>for publishing it as a Proposed Standard.  That implies at least
>a plausible assumption or realistic hope that it will be
>implemented and deployed by multiple independent parties.  For
>that purpose, it just isn't complete and doesn't contain enough
>information, with that issue about hashes as one example,
>perhaps among many.   

We already have two implementations in progress, at Gmail and AOL, and
as Tobias said, this got enough attention at MAAWG that I think it's
likely that other webmail providers will do it, too, as will a lot of
ESPs (bulk mail providers.)  I agree that it could use some more hints
about unique URLs to avoid forgery.

I don't know where if anywhere this would go in the draft, but the
ESPs that are likely to implement this have rather different concerns
from discussion lists like this one.  They want the subscribers to get
the mail, but they are much more concerned about minimizing complaints
for fear of their mail going somewhere other than recipients' inboxes.
If you make the unsub process complex, a fair number of people will
figure (correctly for them) that it's easier just to report it all as
spam until it goes away.  

So given a tradeoff between defending against fake unsubscribes versus
making it easy for people to mail the mail stop, they'll pick the
latter.  I doubt this will ever make it into Mailman, but that's OK.

The reason we're having this discussion is that Gmail noticed that
people used the spam button to unsubscribe, so they added an option to
the spam button to unsubscribe at the same time, and for that to work
they need to do it without further interaction.  It'd also be useful
to automatically unsub from mail to closed or abandoned mailboxes.

R's,
John