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."

Comments

Good thing its _A_OL

[Christopher_G_Lewis]

Reading their Sender Qualifications indicates you European emailers are pretty much screwed:

Accreditation Criteria
In order to meet the strict qualifying criteria, an organization must, among other things:

  - have at least 1 year of business history, as verified by a commercial identity verification service
- ***have business headquarters located in the United States or Canada ***

etc...

Re:Good thing its _A_OL

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only a formalising of an old policy. When they first introduced the white/blacklists, they blacklisted all dialup and residential DSL IP addresses. And most of Europe. Thousands of ISPS lost the ability to send email to AOL overnight, and it was maddening trying to find out why. At the time, I was working in IT support, and all of our customers suddenly couldn't send to AOL. In the end, it turned out that the whole Demon ADSL IP range (a large ISP, primarily used by businesses) had been added to the blacklists because of a few spam zombies in the residential range. I managed to persuade Demon to pass on their home/business range info to to AOL and get the issue sorted, but it took about 2 weeks from start to finish.

This is only going to cause worse problems.

Re:Dupe.

[Elminst]

No...
The SENDER pays for the "privelege" of sending mail to AOL.

Re:Dupe.

[afaik_ianal]

That's just FUD. AOL has not said that they are blocking all email that is not sent through GoodMail. They are replacing their whitelist with the service.

You don't need to be on the whitelist to send personal emails today, so you won't need to pay to send email tomorrow.

This only affects senders of bulk emails (mailing lists and spammers).

Bah. Doesn't anyone here know how AOL Mail works!?

[kiddailey]

Judging from the rash of response, I can see that a good portion of people here either do not have AOL accounts or do not know how HTML mail works in AOL.

Currently, if you receive a HTML e-mail in the AOL client, any links or images in the message are not displayed. Instead, only the text of the e-mail is displayed, and a "button" at the top of the message window allows the user to turn on images and links in the message.

What AOL is clearly implementing is a way for "validated" third-parties to pay to have their HTML e-mails sent to AOL users with images and links turned on without requiring the user to take action to see them.

That's it. Nothing more to see here. Please move along.

Re:Dupe.

[monkeydo]

Actually, this seems to only apply to their "enhanced" whitelist, which allows commercial senders to embed links and images in emails. It doesn't seem to affect the standard whitelist for legitimate non-commercial bulk mailers like mailing lists.

Re:Obvious Question but it needs to be asked...

[whoever57]

Have you ever tried to cancel an AOL account?

A friend of mine did that very thing today. My friend had only kept the account for the email address and apparently, AOL will let him keep using the email address even though he is no longer paying anything to AOL.

I was amazed at this, but now, perhaps it make sense: AOL is monetizing all those long-standing email addresses!

Since no one here seems to have RTFA...

[nwbvt]

"The folk who will be left in the cold will be those that host free mailing lists - that could be your local church, local voluntary associations, schools, folk who freely manage topical lists of interest etc. These folk won't make back the money because email isn't a revenue stream. They're the only ones who will see any effect."

First of all, the emails not on this whitelist are not blocked, they merely have any images or links hidden (and while I am not an AO(hel)L user so I cannot know for sure, I'm guessing there is a way for the user to enable them once they have verified that they do indeed want this particular email). Thats the way they currently have it set up, only now it requries senders to go through a lengthy certification process which they have determined is even harder to go through and less effective.

So no, it will not kill of small free mailing lists.

Re:The beginning of the end of spam?

[flynns]

Y'know, I promised myself I'd never do one of these, but it just makes too much sense. All we can do is pray and filter on the client side. Spam is not goin' nowhere. We're not going to stop it. It's never going to stop making money. So...

You personally advocate a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:Do you want a full list of why AOL sucks?

[BrynM]

But they don't want to cancel it, so that's immaterial.

Not to conjure it up somehow, but the fun will just wait until they die. When my grandmother died, I had to deal with many a crappy company to get them to stop charging her for things. Death certificates and all, it was a drag and some companies would "lose" the documentation over and over again. Think it'll just go away because they're dead? The coompanies can sue the estate (your inheritance?) to get the money. They can also collect (harass) from next of kin. You'll just cancel the credit cars then? That can take just as long (interest still accrues).

Again, I hope your grandparents live to be 500, but when anyone gets around the 80s you should be thinking very seriously and often about how things will be handled. I wouldn't wish the ugly ways it can go on anyone.

Clarification from AOL

[zjt]

I got this clarification from AOL...

There is a tremendous amount of misinformation floating around about CertifiedEmail and the implications of such a program. AOL has no plans of terminating the whitelist and your delivery should remain unaffected. We are working diligently to set the record straight and provide the information people need to better understand this program. CertifiedEmail is an enhanced email solution offering detailed reporting, automatically enabled links and images and more.