DOI vs. COI: The Pointless Word War

It's time for a trip down memory lane. We're going way back. Before "deliverability" was even a recognized industry term, our attempts to protect the inbox weren't called "email security." Instead, we called it "spam fighting."Back in those early days, we found community and collaboration with fellow spam fighters via the usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email (NANAE). It was the absolute Wild West. Terminology was new, best practices were forged in flame wars, and debates over exact phrasing could get ... heated.In particular, one of the biggest semantic battlegrounds was the debate over a verified email signup process known by two possible names: double opt-in (DOI), or confirmed opt-in (COI). Back in the day, most anti-spam advocates took umbrage at the term "double opt-in," saying that unsavory marketers favored that term because it implied that signup verification was extra hard, that it added a double step. It was meant to paint the process as bad, as imperfect.That, my…