[liberationtech] Fwd: Avaaz in "grave danger" due to GMail spam filters

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 06:19:35PM -0400, Dave Karpf wrote:
> One distinction that I think is worth pondering though: it seems like the
> standard of "serious about email" is in conflict with the goal of
> "frequently communicating with 20M supporters."

That's a good point.  Two responses:

1. At this moment, I see no evidence on the table that Avaaz has 20M
subscribers.  Right now they have zero, because a subscriber whose
verified provenance can't be produced on demand isn't a subscriber at all.

(I'm not picking on Avaaz here.  Everyone who runs a mailing list
should be able to do that.  I'm certain that the operators of *this list*
could, because they're using Mailman and they're using it properly.)

2. If Avaaz wishes to frequently communicate (via email) with such a
large number of people, then it should make a strong and sustained effort
to comply with standards (in the formal sense, as articulated by RFCs)
and best practices (in the informal sense, the things that all well-run
mailing lists have done for decades.)  People who do these things rarely
have serious and/or persistent issues; people who ignore them or try
to cut corners or dodge them invariably cause their own problems.
(For example, see MoveOn, which long ago got itself hardwired into
a kazillion blacklists -- including those run by people politically
sympathetic to their cause -- because they insisted on spamming.)

---rsk