----- Original Message ----- From: "Alessandro Vesely" <vesely@xxxxxxx> To: <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2014 12:16 PM > On Thu 05/Jun/2014 10:51:05 +0200 T.p. wrote: > > I used to get a reminder once a month of the mailing lists to which I am > > subscribed, such as this one, but, around the time of IETF89, this > > stopped working. I see that the option on every one of the lists to > > which I am subscribed has been reset to not send a reminder, not > > something that I would intentionally ever do > > I'd be curious to know some more on the usefulness of reminders. They are useful because e-mail is overridingly spam or something else evil. Mailing lists have no reliable way of authenticating the From: address. Therefore mailing lists implement a system to suspend a subscription when enough inappropriate mail has come with a given From: address. This happens to me with IETF WG lists (such as, in the past, v6ops). At the same time, some lists are so quiet, especially now in the inter-IETF meeting stadia that it is hard to tell whether or not one is still subscribed. (and I note a number of 'Test' posts to lists which suggests others have similar concerns). The monthly reminder enables me to check that I am still subscribed. Logical. Tom Petch > They're what I call a time-distributed database. When subscribers > need to query the status of their subscription, they simply perform a > time seek --by waiting at most one month-- and voilà! > > Since we've been discussing how DMARC is going to affect the fate of > mailing lists, recently on this list, I wonder why 21st century > technology doesn't offer anything better. The outcome of that > discussion was that mailbox providers don't know the status of their > clients' subscriptions too, hence they cannot deploy any cooperative > solution such as whitelisting, weak signatures, or 3rd party auths. > > Ale > -- > "Never expect the people who caused a problem to solve it." > - Albert Einstein > > > >