Re: Proposed Update for Email Communications

Thank you again for all the feedback and the additional people that have reached out to me
directly.

The issue we’re trying to address isn’t about tracking users - it’s about our users getting
our email at all. More than half of our audience is using a web-based email and 90% are receiving
HTML email. When people open an email, click on links, don’t mark us as spam, filter to the trash
etc - these actions all contribute to a positive “reputation score” on those mail services and
ensure that our messages make it into your inbox, not your junk mail folder. This reputation score
is the measurement of our email sending practices and the extent to which we follow the standards
established by ISPs. 

You can learn more about the implementation and politics of this sort of reputation scoring here
links [1] [2] [3]

Unfortunately text emails don’t have the same feedback loops available as HTML. A lot of people,
of course, consider this to be a feature. But an unintended result is the negative effect that
zero-interaction signals have on our reputation scoring: we have seen an increase in
greylisting/blacklisting as a direct  result of our text only emails, and that typically means we
can’t send any email to *anyone* until it gets resolved. This is what prompted us to revisit
offering text as an option. 

All that said, giving users the ability to choose and respecting those choices is core to
Mozilla’s values, and in retrospect we proposed this change without giving enough consideration
to user privacy and agency, which was a mistake.

After hearing and discussing everyone’s feedback, we’d like to propose a different approach
that will maintain our ability to get relevant messages to interested people and a positive
reputation.

People who have subscribed to text-only emails will be contacted once a year be with a link to
confirm their interest in receiving text emails as well as the option to join other lists, update
delivery method etc. We won’t be tracking any usage via text-only mail, just a reconfirmation
similar to the double-opt-in process when you first sign-up to receive text email. Most importantly
we don’t want to be sending you emails you aren’t interested in.

We think this approach will let us work past the reputation-score and junk mail filtering problems
we’ve had while respecting the wishes of those users’ who’ve chosen the zero-feedback
text-only option.

I hope this makes our motivations for the original proposal clear and speaks to the concerns many
of your have raised and I’d welcome any additional questions or clarifications on the approach.

Best,
Michele

[1] http://resources.mailgun.com/email-reputation.html
[2] https://www.talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/support
[3] https://www.senderscore.org/faq/


_______________________________________________
governance mailing list
governance@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance