[uf-new] New proposal: Microformat for email unsubscribe

[Indus Khaitan]

>
> For clarity, is your expectation that this information would be in the
> footer of HTML mail messages? Or in the Web site(s) that those
> messages reference?
>

Footer of an email message.

>
> Most mail processing is centered around headers. Do you see particular
> benefits to adopting a microformat here? Ease of authoring, of
> consuming, of extensibility etc?
>

Headers, though, simple, are mere directives as name value pairs.
Using microformats would allow extensibility of processing the
message. e.g., encoding the unsubscribe/opt-out mechanism (click thru
urls/reply-to email/etc) as well as any mandatory fields pertaining to
CAN-SPAM compliance.

A compliant email client may extract this and convert in action
buttons for the end-users. There are other things which could be done
once there is a standard way of depicting the unsubscribe like,
embedding workflows, auto-unsubscribe handling, aggregation, spam
ratings, etc.

Indus