There is no standard software/web interface. There’s a half-dozen popular email clients and another half-dozen popular webmail platforms, and getting all of them to agree on a standard is a process that, if you care strongly about it, you’ll fight in the IETF for a minimum of a year.

Al:
I am so sick of the ignorant “some users react irrationally” defense. It’s crap.

This is actually one of the old whipping horses of the antispam world that I can actually see both sides of. Users who sign up, confirm, and then at some later point, complain, I can see how that would make somebody upset. Personally, I think that it’s going to happen whether you get upset or not, and since getting upset doesn’t actually gain you anything, you can probably skip it, but this opinion is not universally shared.

However, I’d point out that whether or not it upsets you, it is a fact of life that you’ll probably need to do something about, and by ‘something’, I mean ‘unsubscribe them’.

Actually, I didn’t miss the point. I agreed with you. What you seem to think as missing the point is understanding how FOSS and the standards process works. In order to get anything into the core code of open source software project (or set up as a standard for commercial vendors to incorporate into their software) you start by creating it. If others see the value in it, then they will both adopt it and start advocating for it.

This is how ARF was created, for instance. AOL started a FBL, then started working with other ISPs to create a standard so FBL emails were standard. That’s how DKIM was created as well. Yahoo wrote and published a spec for Domain Keys, then merged it with the different but similar spec written by Cisco, to create DKIM. Other people saw the value of the protocol and are also contributing to make it a standard.

I do, in fact, agree with you. The ability to unsubscribe through the email client is something that has been talked about for years. Up until now people have only talked about it. Someone needs to step up and create it and then drive the process to get it as a core component of the email client. Given the value to senders, it strikes me that this is a project they are in a much better place to drive than the ISPs.

I understand your position as an antispam advocate but I think you’ll agree that some users react irrationally. People simply forget that they gave permission and either become offensive, or report as spam something that they asked for, because to the user spam is now ‘something I don’t want’, because the ‘this is spam’ button stops them receiving that email any more, but it doesn’t take into account all those other factors.

It was this type of issue that I was thinking out loud about when considering what the solution could be because right now, you’ve got to admit, something’s broken with email – if it wasn’t there wouldn’t be a place for services like those offered by your company. To suggest that email marketers ought to get together and write plug-ins for popular email clients in order to fix the problem misses the point – this is a feature that ought to be a standard part of the software/web interface, as a plug-in it’s subject to vagaries like incompatibilities when the software is upgraded (see how many Firefox plug-ins show errors immediately after an upgrade).

Thank you for making me think more deeply about the subject and I’ll be adding your blog to my Google Reader account to keep abreast of the insights you share here.