After individuals went on Fox News and took to the Internet last week complaining they'd received unsolicited e-mails from the White House, the administration said it would change how it collects addresses. That's a good idea, e-mail experts say, because the White House has plenty of room for improvement. "I would grade their e-mail collection process as an F," said Marco Marini, CEO of ClickMail Marketing, citing privacy and e-mail campaign effectiveness concerns.

The box at the top of WhiteHouse.gov allows anyone to subscribe by simply typing in an e-mail address and ZIP code. What's stopping my friend, or political opponent, from signing me up, Marini wondered? Adding an e-mail confirmation step would be "very easy to implement and would save a lot of headaches," he said. Most sites that users must register for -- from newspapers to banks to stores -- send a confirmation to the e-mail addresses provided before beginning to use the address to communicate with the user. Though the White House said it was changing its e-mail collection process, Marini's basic suggestion is not among the changes made.

"We are implementing measures to make subscribing to e-mails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual's behalf," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement last week. The White House's online director, Macon Phillips, followed that up with a blog post reiterating their suspicion that outside groups were signing up individuals without their permission and saying that changes had been made.