I'm most likely going to close this topic out soon, and collate all the thoughts presented into a plan to follow for the Next Major Release of Dada Mail If you have any more ideas, please see the topic and add your voice:

http://dadamailproject
com/support/boards/viewtopic
php?t=2457

Right now, I think the best thing to do would be the following:

• Save the date with the subscription!

Knowing the day of a subscription can help with administrating a user (or self-administrating yourself, as a subscriber), and can also help out, if you want to do a search-by-date, before sending out a mailing list message Right now, it's a little obscure how it is that you're supposed to bring up subscription history information on a particular subscriber, without slogging through the logs

• Save the confirmation status of a subscription!

Confirmation in this case would be what the addressee has done to confirm a subscription, have they gone through a closed-loop opt-in process or not? Or, is it unknown?

This could be another field that could be searched on, throughout the program

• Integrate some of the new, interesting email sending API's that are now out there

The ones I'm most interested in are Amazon's Simple Email Service:

http://aws
amazon
com/ses/

And PostmarkApp:

http://postmarkapp
com/

Both which required only confirmed subscribers, when sending out a mass mailing using their API's That's what the new confirmed subscription?/verified subscription? field will be for The upside to using these API's is that you also can circumvent any and all hourly email limitations your current hosting provider may have That sort of means, you can send, really really fast, which I know is what everyone wants to do :)

Since everyone is going to start out with a mixed bag of subscribers - ones that there's a record of confirmation and ones that don't, it makes sense to be able to support sending to each group of subscribers, so some people on your mailing list will benefit from sending through one of these APIs, but you can still send the rest the Same Old Way Maybe better receiving rates will be enough of a carrot to convince people to confirm their lists, without forcing them to

Some other ideas presented were really good, including being able to "remind" people you've invited and generally keep track of people who have answered an invite with either a, "yes!" or a, "no!" or haven't answered at all That way you can really see if your invitation is working

Some things I Like, but DO NOT want to do is force someone to comply to a type of subscription model - ie: requiring only confirmed subscriptions or not There's always a, "but I need " to make it work right It's like having a nightclub without a guest list Being able to label a subscription as confirmed or not is enough for me

I'd like to finalize this spec and publish it as, "What Dada Mail 5 is Going to Be" and start a Fundraiser to kickstart things

So, this is the final call for comments :) (I'll put the above as the last entry in the thread)

Thanks for everyone's help - I know it can be thankless and anonymous, but it's so important to the life of the program :)