Click here to go back to www.spam.org
Justin Simoni is the author of Dada Mail, formerly known as Mojo Mail (see press release about the name change), an excellent program for those who want a web based email list management system. It is available for free, or can be installed by Justin for a reasonable fee.
Steve Gallagher is the director of spam.org, in addition to having managed
a few mailing lists himself, mostly for community groups and non-profit organizations.
Below he talks to Justin about the relationships between email lists, spam,
and bulk emailing programs.
Steve: What was your original purpose in starting to write the Dada
Mail program, and who did you think would be using it?
Justin: I actually started writing it as a small project for myself
to learn more Perl. Perl is the programming language that I mostly work in.
I was then (Winter of 1999) living in the
One of the sites, http://unitedskate.com
had a mailing list that was using Majordomo as the back-end. The promoter of
the company didn't know how to use Majordomo and neither did I. Most of the
visitors were kids aged 12 to 18, so they basically skipped the whole part of
the non-WWW internet (as did I).
It was hard to do the most simple tasks in Majordomo and the entire program
has this really odd email interface that seemed destined to stay in the dark
ages. As this legend goes, I fell asleep listening to the Doors (one of the
only things my roommate and I could agree to listen to. The two other things
were David Bowie and New Order). and awoke with the
idea of creating a newer, hipper version of Majordomo, tentatively titled, "Major
Mojo", after the song, LA Woman. There's a part of the song that goes,
"Mr. Mojo Risin', Mr. Mojo Risin'"
again and again and again. It's very haunting. Jim Morrison used to live quite
near my hometown in
I came back to
While working for myself and going to school full-time, I was also interning
at a local web design company. I showed my boss the program and he was probably
the first person to see the merits in the program. As I stated, I wrote the
program initially to teach myself more programming. After a few months, I based
every new program on it.
I initially released the program under the GNU Public License so others could
use it, if they found it useful. The program then was really amazingly primitive
and I really, truly, didn't think it would get quite this popular.
Steve: Were the parts such as the double opt-in, and the required unsubscribe
link (is it really required) at the bottom of each email part of your original
plan, or were they added in later?
Justin: Oh yes! The initial version had double opt-in enabled. A potential
subscriber had to click on a URL that contained a "pin" number unique
to each email address in the confirmation email to subscribe to the list. There
wasn't any other way to subscribe an email, except individually by the administrator
of a list.
I believe unsubscribing also needed this pin number, so the initial version
had double opt-out as well.
Versions of the program following this primitive first version become more user
friendly, harder to spoof, and even easier to use, but the basic concept is
exactly the same. But, it was a completely different way of doing things than
Majordomo.
Steve: Do you think most people using Dada Mail would like to see more
"e-mail best practices" embedded into the program, or are they asking
for more freedom in their use of the program? Or in other words, do people ask
you to help them prevent spam, or are they saying, stay off my back?
Justin: At present, Dada Mail is a fairly flexible program. Many of
the "good neighbor" features of the program, like List headers that
have unsubscribe information, the unsubscription address at the bottom of every
list message are there by default. They can be turned off or customized, but
usually if someone asks if they should, I usually tell them why it's a bad idea.
For example, you can have the List headers suppressed in the email messages,
but it provides a easy way to distinguish the message is coming from a legitimate
mailing list manager, and not just a spammer.
Some safety guards cannot be turned off. For example, you cannot stop someone
from unsubscribing from a list. This is a feature that some people would like
to have the ability to set, but I see the chance of abuse as too great.
When developing the program, I try to make best practices automatic so users
of the program don't have to think about if they're sending out a message that
could be seen as spam. I'd rather have the list owners be more focused on authoring
a really intriguing email, than to have to worry about the delivery - that's
the program and my problem.
Steve: Government regulations are beginning to play more of a part in
the administration of e-mail lists. For instance, if you send out a bulk e-mail
and forget to have an unsubscribe link, it may be possible in the future to
get into major trouble. How do you think people will respond to this?
Justin: One thing these government regulations will do is make it more
complicated to send out a mailing list message. I could see how a potential
sender would be scared to send a message to their list because they are unsure
of the details of the regulations.
My job is to educate people on what they have to do and make the program follow
these regulations automatically so that the sender can focus on the messages
they send. The next version of Dada Mail will require that each list have a
privacy policy written (this is currently optional) and easily accessible and
perhaps even have a physical address just as easily found and used throughout
the program.
Dada Mail already follows many of the most important points of these regulations.
For example, there's a time frame in which an email address unsubscription
request has to be removed from a subscription database. In Dada Mail, this happens
instantly. Hopefully, some small companies will either change their in-house
mailing list managers to conform to these standards or take advantage of something
that's as mature as Dada Mail.
Steve: What sort of things have you done in writing your program that
you might not have done if spam did not exist?
Justin: I've worked hard to make the subscription and unsubscription
process as easy for the potential subscriber to work with as possible. Each
mailing list can have potentially thousands of subscribers, so I've tried to
make the lists themselves bulletproof against hundreds of requests at a time.
The integrity of the program is something that I see as my responsibility. I've
also integrated a subscription log that tells the date, time, ip
address or each email address subscribed. This can be a life saver if a subscription
complaint is filed and an audit has to be done by the ISP.
The simplicity and integrity is what I value the most and what's
appreciate among the program's users.
Steve: Who do you think should be responsible for fighting spam?
Justin: Well, it's fairly obvious that the design of email message delivery
at its lowest level is flawed. There are ways to send a massive amount of unsolicited
emails through open relays. It's very easy to fake where these email messages
come from and very hard to trace back.
This is a problem being worked on by many big league players, such as Microsoft
and Yahoo! Their solutions vary from paying for each email sent to new authentication
schemes. It's going to be very hard to replace this entire email protocol, but
the future should be exciting. I hope that whatever comes next keeps intact
the idea of open standards and communication that are absolutely essential to
the Internet.
I can't see email going away in the foreseeable future. I myself rely on it
as a cheap and efficient communication device, organizer and most importantly,
a universal way I can keep in touch with people I meet wherever I travel.
It's hard to say that any one entity should be responsible for spam, but it's
always best to do as much as you personally can. My hosting provider currently
uses Spam Assassin to flag messages that could potentially be spam and I use
Apple's Mail.app that can be "taught" to
understand what's spam. With these two tools alone,
most spam that I receive I never even see.
But, if you are a list owner sending out messages, my best advice would be to
pen an engaging email message that's succinct and isn't just a blatant ad to
buy something. Email is very different from a technology like RSS feeds in that
it seems much more personal. Messages I send out try to keep a casual voice
to entertain, educate and then perhaps tell people of a new product available.
Steve: Do you think spammers are killing the mailing lists? Some people
have said, "I'm junking my e-mail list and converting to a Blog".
Are they right?
Justin: Email accounts are definitely polluted with spam, but as I've
shown with my Spam Assassin setup and the Bayesian filter in Mail.app,
nothing really touches me. Web logs have a different function that a mailing
list. I myself have a journal at http://skazat.com which I write to at least
once a week. It also has a RSS feed attached to it.
I mail out to a list once a month and never more than that. The message I write
is a manual rundown of what I've written and perhaps a back story or even an
update to it. What I give is choice. If you're passively interested in the site,
you'll check in once in a while. If you're very interested in the site, you
can keep the RSS feed link handy. If you're extremely interested in the site,
you can subscribe to the mailing list. I try to entertain more in the mailing
list messages I send out than in the RSS feeds that just give you the title
of the page. Email is a more personal medium than RSS and can work as a reminder
to the Weblog or any sort of website.
Someone who runs an announcement mailing list should understand that the number
of messages you send out should be clear to the would-be subscriber in advance
of signing up for the mailing list. I usually lean towards, "less is more".
If you use a mailing list too much by sending lots of messages, your subscribers
will get tired of receiving them, no matter what.
But mailing lists and web logs can work with each other, instead of replacing
them. With a plugin for Dada Mail, you can send, say,
the last week of headlines written in the weblog.
It's really neat stuff.
Steve: What do you feel are the most important advantages of e-mail
lists?
There's many advantages to e-mail lists. The universality
of email is amazing. I don’t know anyone without an email address. An email
message tends to be much more personal than an automated feed. Again, I can't
see email going away - changing for the better, definitely, but it's too useful
of a tool to completely dump. These advantages are also its downfall, but it's
up to list owners to accept that they have a responsibility to write engaging
emails and respect their subscriber's inboxes by limiting the amount of messages
they send out.
Justin: So there you go, let me know how'd you
like to continue…
Steve: OK, Just a few more questions. What other changes are on your
to-do list for Dada Mail, and what problems will they solve?
Justin: I'm working on some exciting things for Dada Mail, but in the
near future, you're just going to see more and more refinement. I made a decision
that it's better to have a program that's as bulletproof and bug free, than
a program that has a lot of whiz-bang features, but is very unreliable.
One of the latest features put into the program was an auto-backup feature,
which will save the state of the archives and settings of each list for as many
steps as you would like. Think of it like a history of your list being kept.
If something happens that is out of your control, which happens frequently on
a shared hosting server, you'll now have more piece of mind that Dada Mail will
survive. This should also make migrating Dada Mail from server to server, even
servers of different operating systems.
Last year saw a barrage of new features to Dada Mail, everything from a completely
rewritten Bounce Handler, called Mystery Girl, to the fully extendable scheduled
mailer, named Beatitude. This year will hopefully see Dada Mail with a new subscription
back end that will support multiple arbitrary fields (currently, Dada Mail only
supports an email address) and rewritten discussion list support.
I've setup some more develop tools that are open to anyone interested and I
have two or three new people who have shown active interest in working on the
program, so their input is going to be graciously appreciated. I'm sure they
have ideas on new directions for the program to take.
There may be a time where I will bow down from development and become more of
a strong influence on the future of the program's direction, but I guess we'll
have to see.
Steve: What do you see in the future, or what would you like for the
future to hold for Dada Mail?or for list management programs in general?
Justin: Well, concerning SPAM, I may have to make a decision if I want
to make passive or active changes to the program. At the moment, I have chosen
a passive approach. I myself have looked into using the Habeas Watermark to
work easily with Dada Mail, but didn't see much promise for whom I see is the
main user of the program: small businesses and individuals. A license to use
Habeas runs into the many thousands of dollars and this price point is much
too high for these entities to take advantage of.
Steve: What do you see as problems or drawbacks for email lists in the
future? (what should people watch out for, can innocent people really get into
spam trouble, or do you really have to be a major scumbag to have problems)
Justin: Most of the annoying mail I receive originate from virus infected
machines. It's unclear who the authors of these viri are and what their vendetta
is. I've observed that most small businesses that do get black listed by a major
ISP become blacklisted for two reasons.
The first reason is that a legitimate, double opted in subscriber becomes confused
about why they're receiving the mailing list message. Either they forgot they
had subscribed, cannot find any directions to unsubscribe or don't even read
the message and instantly hit the "This is Spam" button. Some mail readers make
it almost too simple to flag a message as Spam. This problem can be relieved
by stating at the top of a mailing list message a reminder of what the mailing
list message is
and where unsubscription instructions can be found.
The second reason is that the small business is sending mail to the list at
too high of a frequency. This can aggravate the first reason. This can be easily
rectified by the mailing list owner by stating how many times a mailing will
be done and honoring their own limits. Since email is more personal than other
electronic mediums, I usually side with sending messages in less frequency than
in more. It's akin to taking vitamins. Taking them may be good for your health,
taking too many can be dangerous.
This is where other electronic mediums can help. RSS feed works really well
for updates that happen more than once a week or day or even hour. An RSS feed
that updates every month isn't so helpful, but a carefully written mailing list
message can make me interested in what content/product/service may be available
to me. An RSS or mail list message about year-old content won't be helpful either,
but a searchable archive on a website is invaluable. Each medium has its strengths
and it's advantageous to use them all.
I've also noticed that mailing list owners of sites of questionable ethical
material (ie: porn) that do in fact manage a double opt-in list follow unsubscribe
requests very carefully.
I myself can't comment on who is having legal action taken against them as I
haven't and no client of mine that I know of has as well. I do decline some
jobs if the client is obviously wanting to use Dada Mail for something I can't
personally commend. Many of my clients are non profits, small businesses or
individuals that work for themselves.
Steve: Thanks Justin.
Justin Simoni | http://mojo.skazat.com/
| 720 436 7701
Important Links:
What is Dada Mail? - http://mojo.skazat.com/project/index.html
The Dada Mail SPAM FAQ - http://mojo.skazat.com/support/documentation/SPAM_FAQ.pod.html
Dada Mail and SPAM - http://mojo.skazat.com/project/spam.html
This document is a brief overview of Dada Mail when used for spamming purposes
and the stance of the author on the subject.
Interview with Justin Simoni of the 'hip' Mojo Mail - Nov. 15, 2002 - http://news.osdir.com/article65.html