Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com> wrote: > One way would be solicited == whitelisted. Remember that this is only > necessary for bulk mail. So everyone would need to create a whitelist > of all the mailinglists and newsletters they're subscribed to. This could be eased somewhat with something I was trying to get at earlier. This is separate from the idea of fixing or replacing SMTP, or other spamfighting, but what I envision is some standard format of data about a mailing list. (MLML, for Mailing List Markup Language?) Upon reading this in an email or on the web, the user can take some sort of action (click, reply, etc.), whereby he would be subscribed, and his MUA would whitelist the address the email would come from (or some other such tag, but usually the From addy so as to enable PGP-type authentication). Something like: <mailingList title="Dave's Demented Droppings" name="ddd" host="lists.example.com" whitelistHeader="X-Drivel" whitelistData="Two guys walk into a bar. A third one, ducks." > My mailing list of occasional jokes, stories, and other alleged humor. </mailingList> Ideally, this would set off a confirmation process. This introduces the possibility of whitelisting the addy that the confirmation request will come from, but if we establish a standard for transforming the listname and host to the various admin addies needed, those can be made optional. For instance, in the example above, I could have added owner="dave@lists.example.com", confirm="yesIWantDDD@lists.example.com", or both, or let them default to ddd-owner@lists.example.com and ddd-confirm@lists.example.com. Similarly, there could be explicit or implicit URLs for subscription control (defaulting to something like "http://www.lists.example.com/ddd-control/";, and including possibly that there are none for this list), and a standardized set of commands usable via email, and possibly a standard set of web-based controls. Of course, we would quickly see spam in this format, but that's a whole different question. A brief google doesn't turn up anything obviously relevant; anybody know of any work having been done in this area? -- David J. Aronson, Unemployed Software Engineer near Washington DC See http://destined.to/program/ for online resume, and other info