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...

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.