7 ms·

The article is quite specific in why Mozilla wants to track emails - email being sent to dead email accounts causes greylisting/blacklisting problems for them;

The article is quite specific in why Mozilla wants to track emails - email being sent to dead email accounts causes greylisting/blacklisting problems for them; they want to be able to unsubscribe inactive accounts, and the only way to determine account inactivity is through some sort of feedback mechanism.

smegel 9y ago
I guess privacy is a middling concern in the face of the all important greylist.
- mixedCase 9y ago
  So it seems, the conclusion here after all that's happened in the past few months is that modern Mozilla is no longer a privacy-first company when they're inconvenienced by that stance. Their rallying cry is now nothing more than "we're not as bad as Google". What a sad state of affairs for the Internet in general.
  - gpvos 9y ago
    Did you read the compromise that they found, near the end of the article? It's fine privacywise.
    - mrSugar 9y ago
      For me, the alarming fact is that this "privacywise" option was not the firs one chosen. Instead, they went with a "privacyunwise" option as a default, and only backed out because of user uproar. Bad Mozilla!
      - bzbarsky 9y ago
        I strongly suggest you look at the actual discussion that happened [1]. One Mozilla employee, trying to solve a specific technical problem but not necessarily having thought through all the implications of the proposed solution, suggested the "privacyunwise" option on a public mailing list that Mozilla uses for discussing decisions like this. It's a public list because that's how Mozilla prefers to operate. In the 24 hours that follow, there are 5 responses asking for a clearer description of the problem being solved and why this specific "unwise" option is considered the best solution. Three of those responses are from Mozilla employees. Following this, the author of the original proposal says that clearly more work is needed in terms of solving the particular problem they are facing. A few days later, there were three more mails objecting to the proposal; two from employees, one from a non-employee. A few days after that, the original proposal author came back with what you call the "privacywise" option. So: 1) The "privacyunwise" option was not _chosen_. It was _proposed_, on a list specifically designed to evaluate the sanity of such proposals. This list happens to be public, which is why you know that the option was considered at all before being discarded as not compatible with Mozilla's principles. 2) The "uproar" was largely, but not entirely, by Mozilla staff. The "Bad Mozilla" conclusion can only be based on a misunderstanding of what happened here... Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, I saw this thread; I did not reply to it because other people got there first and I would just be repeating what they said, but had they not replied I most certainly would have. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/WWKmxU4U_K0/-DhK0Es8AwAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/WWK... and following thread.
leephillips 9y ago
Why can't they just ask the recipients to respond if they want to continue getting emails, and drop any addresses that don't?
- Deimorz 9y ago
  That's exactly the end result they came to (again, explained in the article). "But, once a year, those subscribers will get a message asking them to click on a link to confirm their continued interest in remaining on the list."
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- rasz 9y ago
  Wine mailing lists do this, works great.
phicoh 9y ago
Since forever I've been reading html mail using 'lynx -dump'. That never had any negative effect. So my guess is that this particular kind of subscriber tracking is not used all that much (on technical mailing lists).
- bigiain 9y ago
  So Mozilla are claiming that has a negative effect on their sending reputation. If that's true - it's a problem with the companies we've collectively chosen to outsource email reputation to - not with people who want to receive plain text email.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    It’s not a problem for the 4 people who do that. It becomes a problem when you pump lots of email into a good sized provider, and your open rates are poor. Google knows more about what mail you read than you do.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - bigiain 9y ago
      Google knows, for example, that I get the Vagrant-DigitalOcean mailing list mail, and open it maybe a handful of times a year. If they are downgrading that mailing list's reputation based on that they're 100% wrongly reading my intentions into their data. That's Google's fault (even if they're externalising the costs ont ot he mailing list).
carterehsmith 9y ago
I must be missing something here. If the email account is dead, sender (Mozilla in this case) will get an error reply such as "550 No such account", etc. When that happens, obviously, Mozilla should stop sending to that account.
- kentonv 9y ago
  The stated problem is with accounts that are inactive but still open. A gmail account that hasn't been touched in 10 years, for example.
  - carterehsmith 9y ago
    Will that produce a bounce (and so.. graylisting/blacklisting)? I think not, but I may be wrong. BTW the OP said "dead", not "inactive but still open"
    - kentonv 9y ago
      No bounce. My reading of the article is that the problem is with accounts that are still valid, but inactive. If you send a lot of mail to such accounts, e-mail providers flag you as spammy, apparently.
      - pmlnr 9y ago
        So instead of making a fuss about broken anti-spam measures that are breaking email, mozilla gives in to tracking?
        jasonlotito 9y ago
        No. They proposed one way of handling it. People didn't like the proposal. They've come up with another way.
      - dsr_ 9y ago
        ...which is remarkable because the email providers are the ones who are keeping the accounts open. All they need to do is internally maintain a list of dormant accounts (as defined by not connecting to read email in some period of time); send a series of warnings to those accounts; stop accepting email for those accounts; at some point, delete the accounts and let mail bounce. Document the policy and the timeline. What am I leaving out? Oh, forwarding accounts. Let the user mark them as forwarding accounts and change the "dead" heuristic to spot when all mail sent by the account's rules is bouncing. I suppose that might cut the statistical boasting a bit (12 billion active users!) but at this point nobody has any sympathy for marketing departments anyway.
JoshMnem 9y ago
Many people block tracking pixels (by not loading images) anyway, so it doesn't completely make sense. Is the plan to automatically unsubscribe everyone who doesn't load images in emails?
drivingmenuts 9y ago
Why not ask the users to check in once a month or so by having them click a link? That way, it's on the user to remain active. If they don't click the link? So sad but sayonara.
robotresearcher 9y ago
> the only way to determine account inactivity is through some sort of feedback mechanism. Or a timeout (distributed systems 101). Just time-out accounts and send a good-bye email that has a one-click reanimation link.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  Yep, i'm on several mailing lists that send me a "confirm you're alive" link once a year. Works just fine.
- pjtr 9y ago
  From the article: "an acceptable compromise has been found, and the text-only option will remain. But, once a year, those subscribers will get a message asking them to click on a link to confirm their continued interest in remaining on the list. That should allow Mozilla to prune its inactive readers" So that's exactly what Mozilla actually ended up doing.
- taneq 9y ago
  Making spam lists opt-in? I'm pretty sure there's some kind of secret blood oath amongst marketing types that none shall ever make it simpler or more convenient to get off a mailing list, let alone making it harder to stay on one.
  - tpxl 9y ago
    Where I live it is required by law for mailing list emails to have an unsubscribe link at the bottom :)
microcolonel 9y ago
That's what bounces are for. If email is deliverable, it is going to an "active" account. There are several mailing lists I retain for posterity, since I've seen a good handful of them simply disappear along with the archives. Maybe they should limit this measure only to receivers which have a known reputation of downgrading senders of unopened mail.
- thristian 9y ago
  Consider a user who just keeps clicking "mark as junk" until he stops seeing Mozilla mails, instead of unsubscribing. Or an overzealous system that marked a Mozilla mail as junk once, and nobody complained, so it keeps doing it. The user's account still exists and mail can still be delivered so there's no bounce response, but each mail Mozilla sends will be treated as evidence that Mozilla is spamming.
  - janci 9y ago
    Isn't this what "List-Unsubscribe" header is for? The email client should display Unsubscribe option instead of Mark as junk or offer to unsubscribe first.
    - cesarb 9y ago
      That's equivalent to following a link on the email, and it's a well known recommendation that you should never follow links from spam emails. That said, gmail does offer to follow the unsubscribe link for you when you mark an email as junk.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- developer2 9y ago
  The major players tend not to bounce emails. They accept all mail at the edge, and then blackhole it once it's actually looked at by the backend.

smegel 9y ago

I guess privacy is a middling concern in the face of the all important greylist.

mixedCase 9y ago
So it seems, the conclusion here after all that's happened in the past few months is that modern Mozilla is no longer a privacy-first company when they're inconvenienced by that stance. Their rallying cry is now nothing more than "we're not as bad as Google". What a sad state of affairs for the Internet in general.
- gpvos 9y ago
  Did you read the compromise that they found, near the end of the article? It's fine privacywise.
  - mrSugar 9y ago
    For me, the alarming fact is that this "privacywise" option was not the firs one chosen. Instead, they went with a "privacyunwise" option as a default, and only backed out because of user uproar. Bad Mozilla!
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      I strongly suggest you look at the actual discussion that happened [1]. One Mozilla employee, trying to solve a specific technical problem but not necessarily having thought through all the implications of the proposed solution, suggested the "privacyunwise" option on a public mailing list that Mozilla uses for discussing decisions like this. It's a public list because that's how Mozilla prefers to operate. In the 24 hours that follow, there are 5 responses asking for a clearer description of the problem being solved and why this specific "unwise" option is considered the best solution. Three of those responses are from Mozilla employees. Following this, the author of the original proposal says that clearly more work is needed in terms of solving the particular problem they are facing. A few days later, there were three more mails objecting to the proposal; two from employees, one from a non-employee. A few days after that, the original proposal author came back with what you call the "privacywise" option. So: 1) The "privacyunwise" option was not _chosen_. It was _proposed_, on a list specifically designed to evaluate the sanity of such proposals. This list happens to be public, which is why you know that the option was considered at all before being discarded as not compatible with Mozilla's principles. 2) The "uproar" was largely, but not entirely, by Mozilla staff. The "Bad Mozilla" conclusion can only be based on a misunderstanding of what happened here... Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, I saw this thread; I did not reply to it because other people got there first and I would just be repeating what they said, but had they not replied I most certainly would have. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/WWKmxU4U_K0/-DhK0Es8AwAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/WWK... and following thread.

leephillips 9y ago

Why can't they just ask the recipients to respond if they want to continue getting emails, and drop any addresses that don't?

Deimorz 9y ago
That's exactly the end result they came to (again, explained in the article). "But, once a year, those subscribers will get a message asking them to click on a link to confirm their continued interest in remaining on the list."
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
rasz 9y ago
Wine mailing lists do this, works great.

phicoh 9y ago

Since forever I've been reading html mail using 'lynx -dump'. That never had any negative effect. So my guess is that this particular kind of subscriber tracking is not used all that much (on technical mailing lists).

bigiain 9y ago
So Mozilla are claiming that has a negative effect on their sending reputation. If that's true - it's a problem with the companies we've collectively chosen to outsource email reputation to - not with people who want to receive plain text email.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It’s not a problem for the 4 people who do that. It becomes a problem when you pump lots of email into a good sized provider, and your open rates are poor. Google knows more about what mail you read than you do.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bigiain 9y ago
    Google knows, for example, that I get the Vagrant-DigitalOcean mailing list mail, and open it maybe a handful of times a year. If they are downgrading that mailing list's reputation based on that they're 100% wrongly reading my intentions into their data. That's Google's fault (even if they're externalising the costs ont ot he mailing list).

carterehsmith 9y ago

I must be missing something here. If the email account is dead, sender (Mozilla in this case) will get an error reply such as "550 No such account", etc. When that happens, obviously, Mozilla should stop sending to that account.

kentonv 9y ago
The stated problem is with accounts that are inactive but still open. A gmail account that hasn't been touched in 10 years, for example.
- carterehsmith 9y ago
  Will that produce a bounce (and so.. graylisting/blacklisting)? I think not, but I may be wrong. BTW the OP said "dead", not "inactive but still open"
  - kentonv 9y ago
    No bounce. My reading of the article is that the problem is with accounts that are still valid, but inactive. If you send a lot of mail to such accounts, e-mail providers flag you as spammy, apparently.
    - pmlnr 9y ago
      So instead of making a fuss about broken anti-spam measures that are breaking email, mozilla gives in to tracking?
      - jasonlotito 9y ago
        No. They proposed one way of handling it. People didn't like the proposal. They've come up with another way.
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      ...which is remarkable because the email providers are the ones who are keeping the accounts open. All they need to do is internally maintain a list of dormant accounts (as defined by not connecting to read email in some period of time); send a series of warnings to those accounts; stop accepting email for those accounts; at some point, delete the accounts and let mail bounce. Document the policy and the timeline. What am I leaving out? Oh, forwarding accounts. Let the user mark them as forwarding accounts and change the "dead" heuristic to spot when all mail sent by the account's rules is bouncing. I suppose that might cut the statistical boasting a bit (12 billion active users!) but at this point nobody has any sympathy for marketing departments anyway.

JoshMnem 9y ago

Many people block tracking pixels (by not loading images) anyway, so it doesn't completely make sense. Is the plan to automatically unsubscribe everyone who doesn't load images in emails?

drivingmenuts 9y ago

Why not ask the users to check in once a month or so by having them click a link? That way, it's on the user to remain active. If they don't click the link? So sad but sayonara.

robotresearcher 9y ago

> the only way to determine account inactivity is through some sort of feedback mechanism. Or a timeout (distributed systems 101). Just time-out accounts and send a good-bye email that has a one-click reanimation link.

Mithaldu 9y ago
Yep, i'm on several mailing lists that send me a "confirm you're alive" link once a year. Works just fine.
pjtr 9y ago
From the article: "an acceptable compromise has been found, and the text-only option will remain. But, once a year, those subscribers will get a message asking them to click on a link to confirm their continued interest in remaining on the list. That should allow Mozilla to prune its inactive readers" So that's exactly what Mozilla actually ended up doing.
taneq 9y ago
Making spam lists opt-in? I'm pretty sure there's some kind of secret blood oath amongst marketing types that none shall ever make it simpler or more convenient to get off a mailing list, let alone making it harder to stay on one.
- tpxl 9y ago
  Where I live it is required by law for mailing list emails to have an unsubscribe link at the bottom :)

microcolonel 9y ago

That's what bounces are for. If email is deliverable, it is going to an "active" account. There are several mailing lists I retain for posterity, since I've seen a good handful of them simply disappear along with the archives. Maybe they should limit this measure only to receivers which have a known reputation of downgrading senders of unopened mail.

thristian 9y ago
Consider a user who just keeps clicking "mark as junk" until he stops seeing Mozilla mails, instead of unsubscribing. Or an overzealous system that marked a Mozilla mail as junk once, and nobody complained, so it keeps doing it. The user's account still exists and mail can still be delivered so there's no bounce response, but each mail Mozilla sends will be treated as evidence that Mozilla is spamming.
- janci 9y ago
  Isn't this what "List-Unsubscribe" header is for? The email client should display Unsubscribe option instead of Mark as junk or offer to unsubscribe first.
  - cesarb 9y ago
    That's equivalent to following a link on the email, and it's a well known recommendation that you should never follow links from spam emails. That said, gmail does offer to follow the unsubscribe link for you when you mark an email as junk.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
developer2 9y ago
The major players tend not to bounce emails. They accept all mail at the edge, and then blackhole it once it's actually looked at by the backend.