[ih] Design choices in SMTP (custom emails per recipient)

[John Gilmore]

John Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> These days most bulk mail systems customize each recipient's message a
> little, so it's all single recipient sent in parallel anyway.

<[[get off my lawn]]>

Yes, who could have expected that in 2023, each message sent to a
mailing list would have unique spyware carefully inserted into each
recipient's message in the hope of developing a database of detailed
information about where, when, and by whom each message ever sent was
read, re-read, and/or forwarded?

What's even more surprising to me is how the Internet community didn't
run those covertly spying bastards off of our lawn on a rail, for
adopting spammer tactics and then monetizing them to sell the info to
advertisers and governments.  That was my reaction!  At the start,
commercial companies wouldn't adopt the spyware because it made them
look too much like spammers.  So the spyware companies marketed to
nonprofits, which were too non-tech-savvy to notice.  A whole generation
of email-marketing students were taught that secretly spying on your
donors' daily online activities was the preferred way to get them to
give you money.  I ceased my substantial donations to a bunch of
nonprofits who would not reconsider the decision to start including
spyware in their emails (the largest of which was the Drug Policy
Alliance, early on).  This has saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars
per year, while motivating a few savvy nonprofits to learn enough from
me about what was being done in their name by their subcontractor, to
avoid spying on their best supporters and biggest donors.

But the Internet community in general welcomed the spyware companies in!
Perhaps on a mistaken theory that this was somehow contributing to
anti-spam efforts?  It's gotten to the point that now, it takes real
negotiation for even a large pre-existing mailing list to move to a
different bulk email provider without requiring the insertion of spyware
links and web bugs into every message they send.  (For example, the
Internet Archive found itself unable to send fundraising mails without
explicitly agreeing that they could not suppress the spyware that their
new vendor demanded to inject into each message sent.)  Meanwhile, the
same bulk email vendors, particularly MailChimp, don't even offer the
recipients of actual spam sent by the vendor a way to tell the vendor
that the email the recipient is trying to unsubscribe from WAS spam that
the recipient had never signed up to receive.  Apparently the vendors
would rather NOT KNOW that they are taking money from spammers to send
out spams.  But they are happy, no, they insist!, to develop detailed
information about every recipient of every innocuous wanted piece of
email.

</[[get off my lawn]]>

	John