[ProgSoc] NOTICE of Amendments of the Constitution of the Programmers' Society

Roland Turner raz at raz.cx
Tue Mar 29 14:11:38 EST 2011


On 27/03/11 19:46, Tomislav Bozic wrote:

> Surely you can unsubscribe just as easily from the announcements list as
> the main list, though.

Good question:

    * Historically the answer was "no"; the progsoc-announce list was
      simply all members (all members' ProgSoc accounts at one point,
      possibly all contact addresses listed in the member database at
      other times? I don't recall). The idea was that progsoc-announce
      could only be used by the exec, only for official purposes
      (principally notices of meetings) and that it was therefore simply
      the organisation's means of sending official communications to its
      members. There was therefore no means to unsubscribe as there was
      no "subscription".
    * Current email practice[1] makes this approach a little bit
      problematic. If enough of your recipients click "This is Spam"
      then, no matter what permission you think you have, no matter what
      arguments you can muster in favour of what you've done, your email
      will end up blocked, throttled, in spam folders or silently
      discarded. The challenge is no longer to be able to justify your
      action, but to ensure that recipients are as unlikely as possible
      to complain in the first place.

It would probably be sensible for next year's membership renewals to 
request a preferred email address and explicit consent (i.e. default is 
"no") to use that email address for official communication. It would 
then make sense for progsoc-announce to be a moderated mailman list and 
for the subscription list to be replaced with an annual dump from the 
information in the renewals just after the AGM, meaning (a) the 
permission only gets used for the year in which it was intended (old 
addresses get deleted annually) and (b) a self-service means for 
maintaining/ending subscriptions exists.

- Raz

1: http://www.maawg.org/system/files/news/MAAWG_Senders_BCP_Ver2.pdf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://progsoc.org/pipermail/progsoc/attachments/20110329/543e82e7/attachment.html>


More information about the Progsoc mailing list