Bill Cole wrote:
Does RSS itself present a perfect consent system? The readers choose what to subscribe to, and when to unsubscribe, with the them having complete control over consent to read or not read certain communications? If complete consent control can be created in email, with the sender in charge at all times, then that would solve spam, since the sender must actively subscribe to something to receive it. That is one of the motiviations behind pull systems, where a hybrid approach of push and pull is used.At 5:04 PM +0000 11/26/03, Bruce Stephens wrote:Bill Cole <asrg@billmail.scconsult.com> writes: [...] For the respectable end of the market (the confirmed opt-in, or whatever the current phrase is), I agree completely---there's a space for some use of RSS or something much more appropriate than email. Actually, I suspect HTTP with perhaps some automated browser configuration (to switch on monitoring of the relevant web page) would be easier to get going.
That's a technique with 8 years of hard failure modes behind it. It would be nice if there was a reliable lightweight standard way for web browsers to detect significant changes of HTTP-accessible documents, but there isn't. There's about an 80% solution, and the ways that it does not work are non-trivial to solve.