Lots of news for our initiative! Thank you to all of you who are helping us move this project forward. I started writing these lines 15 days ago… I was hoping to write to you in early January 😉 This beginning of the year is busy!

The most important news is that Benjamin Billon has published the draft technical specifications to the IETF in late December. The document is available here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-billon-expires

Comments have already been received, thanks to John R Levine (https://icannwiki.org/John_Levine) and Dave Crocker (https://icannwiki.org/Dave_Crocker) for their advice ! These are valuable comments since they come from important people in the email world.

If you are a techie and have comments on this draft, feel free to join the slack or send an email to Benjamin: bbillon@splio.com

Next steps

If there is no more feedback on the Draft, it will then have to be approved so that it becomes a standard.

But in the meantime, there is still work to do. This one aims at documenting all the use cases of expiration dates in order to facilitate their adoption by brands, ESPs and mailbox providers. That’s what we need to focus on now.

This means organizing workshops to: 

  • Document the different tracks in the technical implementation of expiration dates
  • Document the UX aspects (how to ask the user for consent, which cleaning mechanics, …)
  • Document the legal aspects (differences in constraints per country, modification of the T&C, …)

If you organize workshops in your own company, do not hesitate to send us your notes and thoughts. This way, we can publish them on the initiative’s website and share them with others.

Article by Chad S. White

Chad S. White (Head of Research at Oracle Marketing) recently published a blog post entitled “Should Emails Expire? Yes and No”. Interesting to feed our thoughts.

Read it here: https://onlyinfluencers.com/email-marketing-blog-posts/best-practice-email-strategy/entry/should-emails-expire-yes-and-no

Some ideas if you want to help the project

There are a lot of things you can do! The website continues to evolve (the forms have been migrated and we now have a Premium account offered by Sendinblue), but we can do better on many pages, either on the layout or the content.

Benjamin suggested to me that we could launch a survey with advertisers and brands to better understand how they want to use expiration dates. If anyone wants to take on the task of creating this survey, we’d love it!

As explained above, organizing technical, user experience or legal workshops is our next big step, if you want to organize one, feel free to do so and we’ll relay it on our different communication channels.

If you want to start a documentation work, you are also welcome.

Feel free to share on the project Slack if you don’t know how to get started: https://join.slack.com/t/zerocarbonemail/shared_invite/zt-sxmoqhaf-FY5VKyjemeVUhHlFRRw6pg

New Supporters:

Mailbox Providers:

ESPs:

Others :

Advertisers :

See you soon,

Jonathan Loriaux
jloriaux@zerocarbon.email