J D writes:
However, Google has recently announced that they will be enforcing one-click unsubscribe for bulk senders: https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/03/gmail-to-enforce-harsher-rules-in-2024-to-...
Thoughts?
One-click unsubscribe for bulk senders of *commercial* email. For those of you who are using Mailman to send bulk commercial email, I guess you have to worry whether they're going to apply this to your advertising and product announcement lists only, in which case I guess you end up with a higher than current unsubscribe rate (but if you're smart you'll figure out how to use that expression of disinterest to advantage! ;-) Or if they are going to apply it to user discussion forums as well, in which case you have to think about the issue of user-on-user mischief (eg, redact OTKs or whole footers in quoted material). I'm not sure if we should be in the business of providing those features (they're kinda getting into content and business model), but I'd at least consider adding them to contrib, dunno about the other devs tho. For one thing, we already provide the OTK infrastructure for email verification.
The rest is a nothingburger too. It looks like they're just saying they're going to enforce best practices, like publishing SPF and DKIM policies and signing your outgoing mail with valid keys. Mailman users should already be doing those things, because a lot of sites already bounce or discard unsigned email without valid signatures.
It's the rules that Google does not announce, especially when they have publicly announced the opposite, that are a big threat. Personally I think the company has long since gone over to the Dark Side of the Force, and I'm rooting for the FTC.
Steve