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AOL to Charge Senders for Incoming Email
pdclarry writes "AOL announced on January 30 that it will phase out its Enhanced Whitelist service in June in favour of Goodmail CertifiedEmail, which carries an as yet unspecified per-message fee. Until now, a mailing list gets on the AOL whitelist by following good e-mail practices, such as cleaning up dead addresses, making it easy for people to leave mailing lists, and of course not sending any spam. This is all going to be thrown out the window and replaced with the payment of hard currency to Goodmail. People who can afford to pay this fee will have the privilege of reaching AOL subscribers, others will end up in junk folders. Yahoo is expected to follow down the same path."
Yeah, because free high volume mailing lists are such a huge part of internet usage, especially to the average AOL subscriber. It IS a mountain out of a molehill, because the headline makes it sound like every email sent to any AOL user will cost money, and in fact it's going to affect only a TINY percentage of the members.
Maybe you, as a mailing list administrator, should think about implementing a better solution for delivering content to lots of people?
Man, it's too bad there's not a really easy method to publish information in such a way that a bunch of people can easily get automatically notified when a new item is added. That would be sweet. I think I'm going to invent such a system. I'll call it Really Sweet System.