This article in the Guardian – Protect your achilles heel caught my eye:
My Messages is a read-only inbox for subscribers logged into the eBay site. Effectively, it means that any emails that subscribers receive in their own inboxes are fakes and should be ignored. eBay says it will be used to give new information on buying, selling and events on eBay. A spokesperson said subscribers can use the service secure in the knowledge that all messages come directly from eBay.
[...]
Another subscriber expressed concern about the idea spreading to other services: "This may be a way to provide secure communications from eBay, but if everyone you do business with on the internet goes this route, then you will have to go from site to site just getting your messages. How time-consuming and inconvenient this method will be instead of checking your one email inbox instead. Maybe they should just find a universal way to use secure communications and fix the email systems."
Wouldn't it be a good idea to provide an RSS feed for each of these mailboxes, and use an aggregator to collect your feeds from multiple companies- ebay, paypal, banks, amazon, whatever ? And it has the advantage that opting out is real simple.
Just a thought, while we're waiting for someone to fix the email system...
[update - looks like at least someone else thinks it's a good idea !]
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