What is a Confirmed Opt-In Subscription Process?
Once upon a time, when you sent an email message to join a mailing list, you got right on. These days, we have a lot of pranksters that like to sign up other people for mailing lists. Sometimes signing up the same person to hundreds and thousands of mailing lists at the same time. This creates numerous problems for the recipients of these emails, and for the operators of the mailing lists themselves.
We now also have computer viruses, like the Klez or MyDoom virus, that sends out email with forged email addresses. And these viruses sends out lots of forged messages. When those message arrives at most mailing list servers, it will automatically subscribe the person in the From line, even though that person did not send the email message. Our mail server does NOT work that way.
One of the ways we combat
this is to REQUIRE each potential subscriber to verify that they, in fact,
are the ones who actually requested to be subscribed.