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: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.