I was just drafting an email to a similar effect of Laura's last paragraph. See also the apocryphal story of googlebot deleting entire sites https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Spider_of_Doom
I'd hope even the most rudimental crawler would know not to perform POST actions, and I'd hope everyone else knows enough not to produce side-effecting GET APIs (I know I've been guilty of the same, and fortunately the smart crawlers will usually strip or mangle querystrings before following links). On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 10:36 AM Laura Atkins <la...@wordtothewise.com> wrote: > > On 16 Oct 2018, at 23:06, Luis E. Muñoz via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> > wrote: > > > > On 16 Oct 2018, at 12:42, Brandon Long wrote: > > It is pretty common these days for spam systems to sometimes visit links in > the email message to help determine the spamminess or phishiness or just > plain badness of messages. > > > I can see the value of the datapoint. That said, if the automated filter > visits a confirmation link then it would be breaking COI. How are ESPs > discerning between those visits and the ones originated by the recipient > actually clicking on the confirmation link? > > > Lots of different ways. Proximity to delivery, user agent, IP address are > all things successfully used to distinguish automated from non-automated > clicks. > > It's one of the reasons for the newer > list-unsubscribe-post header in rfc 8058 (as mentioned in the abstract). > > > Yes, I'm aware. However, the context of the conversations on this topic > that I remember were centered around making the link "machine actionable", > in the sense that automatic unsubscribe would not need to jump through > hoops but rather, straight unsubscribe. This could keep the traditional > unsubscribe behavior of presenting a form to collect feedback on the > unsubscribe reason. > > > That wasn’t the whole issue, as I remember the discussions. > > To me this is very different from plainly GETting a link in an email. > > Hopefully this behavior is restricted to images and collateral, not actual > links... but once the line is broken, it's only a matter of time I guess. > > > It hasn’t been for a very long time. This is not new behavior at all. > https://wordtothewise.com/2013/07/barracuda-filters-clicking-all-links/ was > not the first time the behavior was seen, just the first time I publicly > documented it. (Note: others may have documented it before me, but that > link was easy for me to find) > > laura > > -- > Having an Email Crisis? We can help! 800 823-9674 > > Laura Atkins > Word to the Wise > la...@wordtothewise.com > (650) 437-0741 > > Email Delivery Blog: https://wordtothewise.com/blog > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > mailop mailing list > mailop@mailop.org > https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop >
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