On Wed, 2012-06-20 at 18:23 -0700, Russell Clemings wrote:
From the reports I've received, it looks as if they redact only from the headers. With personalization on, I put a "%(user_address)s" token in the non-digest footer and as of the last report I got (June 8) it came through the feedback loop intact.
This may be true, however relying on cleartext in the footer information to identify the recipient has two problems.
First, it restricts the freedom of the list administrator to put whatever he/she wants in the footer, and because the form of footer information is friable, depending on the list admin, it's impossible to write a one-size-fits-all script to pull subscriber addresses from Feedback Reports and deal with complaining subscribers. Putting this information in a header which is added depending only on whether personalization/verp is enabled or not is independent of what the list admin decides he/she wants subscribers to see in the footer - which should be there for the benefit of subscribers, not list admins.
Second, putting the subscriber's email address as cleartext in _any_ part of a post makes it subject to AOL's redaction process. Whether or not they are currently redacting this in footer information doesn't mitigate the fact that they reserve the right to do so, according to their TOS. Changes to what is and isn't redacted over the past couple of years indicates that they periodically change or refine this process. It seems, however, according to their online documents, that if the recipient address is encrypted or hashed, then it meets their spec and won't raise objections, or redactions.
I've never figured out a similar fix for digests, however, and that seems to be where most of the reports come from. So maybe there's room for a new approach there.
If the information in in the header, it's there regardless of whether a subscriber chooses to receive digests or individual posts.
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